








LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



I 

Chap Copyright No..,.._ 

Shelf__J_!1.8 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



£4* 

■ 



Copyright, 1898, by 
WESTERN PUBLISHING HOUSE 



Words A. L.— 1-8 



' 






PREFACE. 



This book is not a biography, nor was it intended 1 ) 
be. Its main purpose is to put within the reach of ou l" 
youth a collection of Lincoln's words which, in them- 
selves, will be a source of inspiration to all that read 
them and will serve as models of good English to the 
schools, and to make known his words as they ought 
to be known by all good Americans. 

It is impossible to lay too much stress upon theso 
qualities of Lincoln's words: their inspiring powc, 
their terseness and vigor, and their worthiness to fje 
studied and known by his countrymen. The edit >r, 
therefore, asks the special attention of the readers of 
this book to what has been said upon this matter by 
the writers quoted. 

A second purpose of the book is to gather togel her 
into such form as will make them easily accessible to 
the young, those speeches, letters and state paper i of 
Mr. Lincoln that most clearly reveal what sori of 
patriot, statesman and man he was. It has in it, th ^re- 
fore, no connected or detailed account of Mr. Lincc '.n's 
boyhood or early manhood. It begins with him wl ere 
his national life may be said to begin, in the middl i of 
the year 1858, giving some of his deeds and words fiom 
that time to his death. What he did and said beJ ore 
1858, though important as a preparation for his lai^er 
work, were almost entirely local in their character, and 
have, therefore, a limited interest to the young people 

3 



6 PREFACE. 

nee led piece of history covering the question of slavery 
in the United States as only Mr. Lincoln has covered 
il , and giving an exposition of the war for the Union 
inade by a master hand. The words and example of 
Lincoln, rightly understood by our young people, 
cannot fail of good in bringing them to see more 
clearly what true patriotism is as set forth in the say- 
ings and deeds of "the kindly-earnest, brave, fore- 
seeing man," who gave his life also to the cause 
for which so many others died, "that government of 
the people, by the people, for the people, shall not 
perish from the earth." 



Burlington, Vt., September, iJ 



I. T. 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 

Acknowledgments are due for permission to use copyright se- 
lections in this volume as follows: To Horace L. Traubel, for "My 
Captain ;" to the Independent of New York, for the stories taken 
.'om "Six Months at the White House," to D. Appleton & Co., 
fc • the selections from "Herndon's Life of Lincoln" and for the 
poc ris by Bryant which are taken by their special permission 
from the Poetical Works of Wm. Cullen Bryant, edited by Parke 
Godw n. The selections by Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Taylor, 
Schur and Phoebe Cary are used by permission of and by special 
arrang, Tient with Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 

Publishers. 



CONTENTS. 



Chronological list of events in the life of Abraham Lincoln . 10 

Lincoln's favorite poem .... William Knox. n 

Extract from "Abraham Lincoln" Janus Russell Lowell. 14 

Lincoln's boyhood and youth . . . Carl Schurz. 20 

Lincoln's method of study . . Rev. J. P. Gulliver. 24 

Lincoln's three great political speeches 26 

Speech at Springfield, 111. — June 16, 1858 .... 27 

Lincoln's rule of political action . . Leonard Swell. 40 

Lincoln as an orator .... Win. H. Herndon. 42 

Speech in reply to Senator Douglas — July 10, 1858 . . 45 

Lincoln as a lawyer Leonard Swell. 61 

Lincoln as a lawyer . . . Judge David Davis. 62 

Lincoln as a lawyer .... Win. H. Herndon. 64 

Speech at Cooper Union, New York — February 27, i860 . 66 

Extract from speech at Hartford, Conn. — March 5, 1S60 . 97 

Some characteristics of Lincoln . . Joshua F. Speed. 98 

Farewell speech at Springfield, Illinois — February 11, 1861 . 100 

Extract from speech at Pittsburg — February, 1861 . . 101 

Speech at Philadelphia — February 21, 1861 . . . 103 

The situation in 1S6 1 Carl Schurz. 105 

First Inaugural Address — March 4, 186 1 .... 109 

Estimate of Lincoln .... Wm. H. Herndon. 124 

Lincoln's management of men . . Leonard Swett. 129 

A proclamation — April 15,1 861 131 

Message to congress in special session — July 4, 1S61 . . 133 
Lincoln's mode of life at the White House . John Hay. 158 
Message to congress recommending compensated emancipa- 
tion — March 6, 1862 161 

Message to congress — April 16, 1862 164 



8 CONTENTS. 

Page 
Proclamation revoking General Hunter's order of military 

emancipation — May 19, 1862 ...... 165 

Order authorizing employment of contrabands — July 22, 1S62 168 

Letter to Horace Greeley — August 22, 1S62 . . . 169 

Preliminary emancipation proclamation — September 22, 1S62 170 

Final emancipation proclamation — January 1, 1863 . . 174 
Account of the emancipation proclamation, as related to F. 

B. Carpenter ......... 177 

Hymn after the emancipation proclamation 

Oliver Wendell Holmes. 180 

The death of slavery . . . William Cull en Bryant. 181 

Lincoln's letters Carl Schurz. 184 

Letter to J. C. Conkling — August 26, 1S63 . . . . 186 

Letter to A. G. Hodges —April 4, 1S64 193 

An English estimate of Lincoln 

— London Spectator, April 25 and May 2, 1891 . . 196 
Letter to General G. B. McClellan — April 9, 1862 . . . 202 
Letter to General G. B. McClellan — May 9, 1862 . . 205 
Letter to General G. B. McClellan — October 13, 1862 . . 206 
Letter to General Schofield relating to the removal of Gen- 
eral Curtis — May 27, 1S63 210 

Letter to General U. S. Grant — July 13, 1S63 . . . .211 

Letter to General U. S. Grant — April 30, 1864 . . . 212 

Order for Sabbath observance — November 16, 1862 . . 213 

Our good president Ph&be Cary. 214 

Tribute to President Lincoln 

— London Daily News, April 27, 1865 .... 216 

Abraham Lincoln . . . William Cull en Bryant. 21S 
Letter to the workingmen of Manchester, England — January 

19. l86 3 219 

Proclamation for Thanksgiving — October 3, 1863 . . . 222 
Address at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Ceme- 
tery — November 19, 1863 224 



CONTENTS. 9 

Page 

Extract from Gettysburg ode . . . Bayard Taylor. 225 

Extract from the last annual message — December 6, 1S64 . 226 

Laus Deo! .... John Greenleaf Whit tier. 234 

Second inaugural address — March 4, 1S65 .... 237 

The "second inaugural" 

— London Spectator, April 25 and May 2, 1891 . . 240 

Last public address — April 11, 1S65 241 

My Captain Walt Whitman. 248 

Extract from commemoration ode . James Russell Lowell. 250 

Some stories about Lincoln ....... 255 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Opp. Pa;'e 

Portrait of Lincoln n 

Log cabin in which Lincoln was born .... 20 

Residence in Springfield 64 

Wigwam, Chicago 98 

Portrait of Lincoln 170 

Gettysburg National Cemetery 224 

Lincoln Monument, Springfield 24S 

White House 255 



IO CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF EVENTS. 



Chronological List of Events in the Life of 
Abraham Lincoln. 

Born in a log-cabin near Hodgensville, now Larue county, 

Kentucky February 12, 1809 

His father moves with his family into the wilderness near 

Gentryville, Indiana 1816 

His mother dies, at the age of 35 1818 

His father's second marriage 18 19 

Makes a trip to New Orleans and back, at work on a flat- 
boat - - 1828 

Drives in an ox-cart with his father and stepmother to a 

clearing on the Sangamon river, near Decatur, Illinois 1829 
Makes another flat-boat trip to New Orleans and back, on 
which trip he first sees negroes shackled together, 
and forms his opinions concerning slavery - - May, 1831 
Begins work in a store at New Salem, Illinois - - August, 183 1 
Enlists in the Black Hawk war; elected a captain of 

volunteers -- 1832 

Announces himself a whig candidate for the legislature, 

and is defeated - - - - • 1832 

Elected to the Illinois legislature 1834 

Reelected to the legislature , 1835 to 1842 

Studies law at Springfield - 1837 

Is a presidential elector on the whig national ticket - - 1840 

Marries Mary Todd November 4, 1842 

Canvasses Illinois for Henry Clay ----- 1844 

Elected to congress -- 1846 

Supports General Taylor for president - - - - 1648 

Engages in law practice - 1S49-1854 

Debates with Douglas at Peoria and Springfield - - 1855 

Aids in organizing the republican party - 1855-1856 

Joint debates in Illinois with Stephen A. Douglas - - 1858 

Visits New York, and speaks at Cooper Union - February, i860 
Attends republican state convention at Decatur; declared 

to be the choice of Illinois for the presidency - - May, i860 
Nominated at Chicago as the republican candidate for 

president - May 16, i860 

Elected president over J. C. Breckenridge, Stephen A. 

Douglas and John Bell - - - - November, i860 

Inaugurated president - March 4, 1861 

Issues first order for troops April 15, 1861 

Issues emancipation proclamation - - - January 1, 1863 
His address at Gettysburg - - - - November 19, 1863 
Calls for 500,000 volunteers - J u ly> 1864 

Renominated and reelected president ----- 1864 

His second inauguration March 4, 1865 

Assassinated April 14, 1865 




±// aLC^sCtr&s 



THE WORDS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



t^ t*- •>*. 



LINCOLN'S FAVORITE POEM. 

Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud? 
Like a swift- fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, 
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, 
He passeth from life to his rest in the grave. 

The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade, 

Be scattered around, and together be laid ; 

And the young and the old, and the low and the high. 

Shall moulder to dust, and together shall lie. 

The infant a mother attended and loved; 
The mother that infant's affection who proved; 
The husband, that mother and infant who blest, — 
Each, all, are away to their dwellings of Rest. 

The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose 

eye, 
Shone beauty and pleasure, — her triumphs are by; 
And the memory of those who loved her and praised, 
Are alike from the minds of the living erased. 



f 
12 Lincoln's favorite poem. 

The hand of the king that the sceptre hath borne, 
The brow of the priest that the mitre hath worn, 
The eye of the sage, and the heart of the brave, 
Are hidden and lost in the depths of the grave. 

The peasant, whose lot was to sow and to reap, 

The herdsman, who climbed with his goats up the 

steep, 
The beggar, who wandered in search of his bread, 
Have faded away like the grass that we tread. 

The saint, who enjoyed the communion of heaven, 
The sinner, who dared to remain unforgiven, 
The wise and the foolish, the guilty and just, 
Have quietly mingled their bones in the dust. 

So the multitude goes — like the flower or the weed 
That withers away to let others succeed; 
So the multitude comes — even those we behold, 
To repeat every tale that has often been told. 

For we are the same our fathers have been; 
We see the same sights our fathers have seen ; 
We drink the same stream, we view the same sun, 
And run the same course our fathers have run. 

The thoughts we are thinking, our fathers would think; 
From the death we are shrinking, our fathers would 
shrink; 



LINCOLN '5 FAVORITE POEM. 1 3 

To the life we are clinging-, they also would cling; — 
But it speeds for us all like a bird on the wing. 



They loved — but the story we cannot unfold; 
They scorned — but the heart of the haughty is cold; 
They grieved — but no wail from their slumber will 

come; 
They joyed — but the tongue of their gladness is dumb. 

They died — aye. they died; — we things that are n 
That walk on the turf that lies over their brow, 
And make in their dwellings a transient abode, 
Meet the things that they met on their pilgrimage 
road. 

Yea ! hope and despondency, pleasure and pain, 
Are mingled together in sunshine and rain ; 
And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, 
Still follow each other, like surge upon surge. 

'Tis the wink of an eye — 'tis the draught of a breath — 
From the blossom of health to the paleness of death, 
From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud : — 
Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud? 

William Knox. 



N : te. — Mr. Knox was a Scotchman, a contemporary of Sir 
Walter Scott. He died in 1S25, at the age c: 



14 EXTRACT FROM ''ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 



EXTRACT FROM "ABRAHAM LINCOLN." 

Never did a President enter upon office with less 
means at his command, outside his own strength of 
heart and steadiness of understanding, for inspiring 
confidence in the people, and so winning it for himself, 
than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was 
that he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his 
availability, — that is, because he had no history, — and 
chosen by a party with whose more extreme opinions 
he was not in sympathy, t It might well be feared that 
a man past fifty, against whom the ingenuity of hostile 
partisans could rake up no accusation, must be lacking 
in manliness of character, in decision of principle, in 
strength of will ; that a man who was at best only the 
representative of a party, and who yet did not fairly 
represent even that, would fail of political, much more 
of popular, support. And certainly no one ever entered 
upon office with so few resources of power in the past, 
and so many materials of weakness in the present, as 
Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of the Union which 
acknowledged him as President, there was a large, and 
at that time dangerous minority, that hardly admitted 
his claim to the office, and even in the party that 
elected him there was also a large minority that sus- 
pected him of being secretly a communicant with the 
church of Laodicea.* All that he did was sure to be 



*See the Book of Revelations, chapter iii., verse 15. 



extract r:- m uhcc 15 

virulently attacked as ultra by one side; all that he 
left undone, to be stigmatized as proof of lukewarm- 

..nd backsliding by the other le he was 

to carry on a truly colossal war by means of both ; he 

I i disengage the country from diplomatic entangle- 
ments of unprecedented peril undisturbed by the help 
or the hindrance of either, and to win from the crown- 
ing dangers of his administration, in the confidence of 
the people, the means of b vn. He 

has contrived to do it, and perhaps none of our I 
dents since Washington has stood so firm in the confi- 
dence of the people as he does after t: rs of 

- '- . " . ML 

Mr. Lincoln's p ls a tentati e one. and rii 

so. He laid down no programme which must compel 
him to be either inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron 
theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as they 
rose - be use"..— I ends. He seemed to 

have chosen Mazarin*s mo::o. Lc temp* :: The 

vas not very prominent at first ; but 
it has grown more and more s odd is begin- 

ning to be persuaded that it stands for a character of 
marked individuality and capacity for affairs. Time 
was his prime-minister, and, we began to think, at one 
period, his general-in-chief a'.s?. At first he was 

that he tired out all those who see no evidence of 
progress but in blowing up the engine; then he was - 



XIV. o: France. Time. :; :r^e--::::;".e:. 



1 6 EXTRACT FROM "ABRAHAM LINCOLN.' 

fast, that he took the breath away from those who 
think there is no getting on safely while there is a 
spark of fire under the boilers. God is the only being 
who has time enough ; but a prudent man, who knows 
how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to 
find as much as he needs. Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to 
us in reviewing his career, though we have sometimes 
in our impatience thought otherwise, has always 
waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment 
brought up all his reserves. Semper ?wcuit differre 
paratis* is a sound axiom, but the really efficacious 
man will also be sure to know when he is not ready, 
and be firm against all persuasion and reproach till 
he is. 

Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of 
a ready-made ruler. But no case could well be less in 
point; for, besides that he was a man of such fair- 
mindedness as is always the raw material of wisdom, 
he had in his profession a training precisely the oppo- 
site of that to which a partisan is subjected. His 
experience as a lawyer compelled him not only to see 
that there is a principle underlying every phenomenon 
in human affairs, but that there are always two sides to 
every question, both of which must be fully understood 
in order to understand either, and that it is of greater 
advantage to an advocate to appreciate the strength 
than the weakness of his antagonist's position. Noth- 
ing is more remarkable than the unerring tact with 

* It is always bad for those who are ready to put off action. 



; - 

-b, in h: he went 

ght to the reason of the qo sstioa not 

r v t r ':. ;- i . 

the fact, that opposed to a man exceptionally adr 

using popular prejudice and bigotry purpose. 

•-•■-■-.- 

motives that turr. - to a m 

barbarians, he should yet ha 

; ir ~ :: :bt :t.;;'.: Mr 1 in :.n ~i- _^ :br if r :ssi':.= 
:r:~ ^r :-:::n:r: r.«:b:i: _r. His i^l :~ — ^s ~ ^ir 
up of a knowledge of things as well as of mer 
sagacity resulted from a clear perception and h 

1 bin :; 

. - 

not on any abs" - ict so much 

E rn ~ ; — er: 
in bnrr-ar. ^r . .:.t : : m 

. : - _ - - r. I . •_ : . - 
----- -- - trainial sratesman — : airr. i: :be :—: aai 

if be if 
:ba:. His ; - _ : 

■ - V r - - T - - --- "^— - - -- 

in :be ; : . ~~ mines ::' — - .-. ::' 

Hi - m: :. —an — "- : 

ar_;e 
d: re' 

is: :f :b= 

:•£ ~an . 



l8 EXTRACT FROM "ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

that more than anything else won him the unlimited 
confidence of the people, for they felt that there would 
be no need of retreat from any position he had 
deliberately taken. The cautious, but steady, advance 
of his policy during the war was like that of a Roman 
army. He left behind him a firm road on which public 
confidence could follow; he took America with him 
where he went ; what he gained he occupied, and his 
advanced posts became colonies. The very homeli- 
ness of his genius was its distinction. His kingship 
was conspicuous by its workday homespun. Never 
was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little conscious of 
it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the 
people. With all that tenderness of nature whose 
sweet sadness touched whoever saw him with some- 
thing of its own pathos, there was no trace of senti- 
mentalism in his speech or action. He seems to have 
had but one rule of conduct, always that of practical 
and successful politics, to let himself be guided by 
events, when they were sure to bring him out where 
he wished to go, though by what seemed to unprac- 
tical minds, which let go the possible to grasp at the 
desirable, a longer road. 

On the day of his death, this simple Western attor- 
ney, who according to one party was a vulgar joker, 
and whom the doctrinaires among his own supporters 
accused of wanting every element of statesmanship, 
was the most absolute ruler in Christendom, and this 
solely by the hold his good-humored sagacity had laid 



EXTRACT FROM "ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 19 

on the hearts and understandings of his countrymen. 
Nor was this all, for it appeared that he had drawn the 
great majority, not only of his fellow-citizens, but of 
mankind also, to his side. So strong and so persuasive 
is honest manliness without a single quality of romance 
or unreal sentiment to help it ! A civilian during times 
of the most captivating military achievement, awk- 
ward, with no skill in the lower technicalities of man- 
ners, he left behind him a fame beyond that of any 
conqueror, the memory of a grace higher than that of 
outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than 
mere breeding. Never before that startled April 
morning did such multitudes of men shed tears for the 
death of one they had never seen, as if with him a 
friendly presence had been taken away from their 
lives, leaving them colder and darker. Never was 
funeral panegyric so eloquent as the silent look of 
sympathy which strangers exchanged when they met 
on that day. Their common manhood had lost a 

kinsman. 

James Russell Lowell. 

Note. — This essay was first published in the Atlantic Monthly, 
January, 1864. The last paragraph was added when Mr. Lowell 
collected his essays into book form. In the complete edition of 
his works the date is given 1S64-1865. 



20 LINCOLN'S BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 



LINCOLN'S BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 

The statesman or the military hero born and reared 
in a log cabin is a familiar figure in American history; 
but we may search in vain among our celebrities for 
one whose origin and early life equaled Abraham Lin- 
coln's in wretchedness. He first saw the light in a 
miserable hovel in Kentucky, on a farm consisting of a 
few barren acres in a dreary neighborhood ; his father 
atypical "poor Southern white," shiftless and improvi- 
dent, without ambition for himself or his children, 
constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he 
might make a living without much work; his mother, 
in her youth handsome and bright, grown prematurely 
coarse in feature and soured in mind by daily toil and 
care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and 
utterly void of elevating inspirations. Only when the 
family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of 
Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a 
woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the 
children, the shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, for- 
lorn boy, then seven years old, "began to feel like a 
human being." Hard work was his early lot. When 
a mere boy he had to help in supporting the family, 
either on his father's clearing, or hired out to other 
farmers to plough, or dig ditches, or chop wood, or 
drive ox teams; occasionally also to "tend the baby," 
when the farmer's wife was otherwise engaged. He 



LINCOLN S 150YHOOD AND YOUTH. 2 1 

could regard it as an advancement to a higher sphere 
of activity when he obtained work in a "cross-roads 
store," where he amused the customers by his talk over 
the counter; for he soon distinguished himself among 
the backwoods folk as one who had something to say 
worth listening to. To win that distinction, he had to 
draw mainly upon his wits; for, while his thirst for 
knowledge was great, his opportunities for satisfying 
that thirst were woefully slender. 

In the log school-house, which he could visit but 
little, he was taught only reading, writing, and 
elementary arithmetic. Among the people of the 
settlement, bush farmers and small tradesmen, he 
found none of uncommon intelligence or education; 
but some of them had a few books, which he borrowed 
eagerly. Thus he read and re-read "^sop's Fables," 
learning to tell stories with a point and to argue by 
parables; he read "Robinson Crusoe," "The Pilgrim's 
Progress," a short history of the United States, and 
Weems' "Life of Washington." To the town con- 
stable's he went to read the Revised Statutes of Indi- 
ana. Every printed page that fell into his hands he 
would greedily devour, and his family and friends 
watched him with wonder, as the uncouth boy, after 
his daily work, crouched in a corner of the log cabin or 
outside under a tree, absorbed in a book while munch- 
ing his supper of corn bread. In this manner he began 
to gather some knowledge, and sometimes he would 
astonish the girls with such startling remarks as that 



22 LINCOLN S BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 

the earth was moving around the sun, and not the sun 
around the earth, and they marveled where "Abe" 
could have got such queer notions. Soon he also felt 
the impulse to write; not only making extracts from 
books he wished to remember, but also composing 
little essays of his own. First he sketched these with 
charcoal on a wooden shovel scraped white with a 
drawing-knife, or on basswood shingles. Then he 
transferred them to paper, which was a scarce com- 
modity in the Lincoln household; taking care to cut 
his expressions close, so that they might not cover too 
much space, — a style-forming method greatly to be 
commended. Seeing boys put a burning coal on the 
back of a wood turtle, he was moved to write on 
cruelty to animals. Seeing men intoxicated with 
whisky, he wrote on temperance. In verse-making, 
too, he tried himself, and in satire on persons offensive 
to him or others. Also political thoughts he put upon 
paper, and some of his pieces were even deemed good 
enough for publication in the county weekly. 

Thus he won a neighborhood reputation as a clever 
young man, which he increased by his performances as 
a speaker, not seldom drawing upon himself the dis- 
satisfaction of his employers by mounting a stump in 
the field, and keeping the farm hands from their work 
by little speeches in a jocose and sometimes also a 
serious vein. At the rude social frolics of the settle- 
ment he became an important person, telling funny 
stories, mimicking the itinerant preachers who hap- 



Lincoln's boyhood and youth. 23 

pened to pass by, and making his mark at wrestling 
matches, too; for at the age of seventeen he had 
attained his full height, six feet four inches in his 
stockings, if he had any, and a terribly muscular clod- 
hopper he was. But he was known never to use his 
extraordinary strength to the injury or humiliation of 
others ; rather to do them a kindly turn, or to enforce 
justice and fair dealing between them. All this made 
him a favorite in backwoods society, although in some 
things he appeared a little odd to his friends. Far 
more than any of them, he was given not only to read- 
ing, but to fits of abstraction, to quiet musing with 
himself, and also to strange spells of melancholy, from 
which he often would pass in a moment to rollicking 
outbursts of droll humor. But, on the whole, he was 
one of the people among whom he lived; in appear- 
ance, perhaps, even a little more uncouth than most of 
them, — a very tall, rawboned youth, with large 
features, dark, shriveled skin, and rebellious hair; his 
arms and legs long, out of proportion ; clad in deerskin 
trousers, which from frequent exposure to the rain 
had shrunk so as to sit tightly on his limbs, leaving 
several inches of bluish shin exposed between their 
lower end and the heavy tan colored shoes ; the nether 
garment held usually by only one suspender, that was 
strung over a coarse home-made shirt ; the head cov- 
ered in winter with a coonskin cap, in summer with a 
rough straw hat of uncertain shape, without a band. 
From Carl Schvrz. 



24 LINCOLN S METHOD OF STUDY. 



After his Cooper Union Speech, February 27, i860, 
Mr. Lincoln visited, among other places, Norwich, Conn. 
The following is his answer to a question of Mr. Gulli- 
ver, in the railway train on his way back to New York: 

LINCOLN'S METHOD OF STUDY. 

Well, as to education, the newspapers are correct ; I 
never went to school more than six months in my life. 
But, as you say, this must be a product of culture in 
some form. I have been putting the question you ask 
me to myself, while you have been talking. I can say 
this, that among my earliest recollections I remember 
how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when 
anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. 
I don't think I ever got angry at anything else in my 
life. But that always disturbed my temper, and has 
ever since. I can remember going to my little bed- 
room, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening 
with my father, and spending no small part of the night 
walking up and down, and trying to make out what was 
the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark say- 
ings. I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when 
I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught 
it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied 
until I had repeated it over and over, until I had put it 
in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I 
knew to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with 



LINCOLN S METHOD OF STUDY. 25 

me, and it has stuck by me ; for I am never easy now, 
when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it 
north, and bounded it south, and bounded it east, and 
bounded it west. Perhaps that accounts for the 
characteristic you observe in my speeches, though I 
never put the two things together before. 

Oh, yes! I "read law," as the phrase is — that is, I 
became a lawyer's clerk in Springfield, and copied 
tedious documents, and picked up what I could of law 
in the intervals of other work. But your question 
reminds me of a bit of education I had, which I am 
bound in honesty to mention. In the course of my 
law-reading, I constantly came upon the word demon- 
strate. I thought at first that I understood its mean- 
ing, but soon became satisfied that I did not. I said to 
myself, "What do I mean when I demonstrate, more 
than when I reason or prove? How does demonstra- 
tion differ from any other proof?" I consulted 
Webster's Dictionary. That told of "certain proof," 
"proof beyond the possibility of doubt" ; but I could 
form no idea what sort of proof that was. I thought a 
great many things were proved beyond a possibility of 
doubt, without recourse to any such extraordinary proc- 
ess of reasoning as I understood "demonstration" to 
be. I consulted all the dictionaries and books of refer- 
ence I could find, but with no better results. You 
might as well have defined blue to a blind man. At 
last I said, "Lincoln, you can never make a lawyer if 
you do not understand what demonstrate means"; 



26 Lincoln's three great political speeches. 

and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to 
my father's house, and stayed there till I could give 
any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight. 
I then found out what "demonstrate" means, and went 
back to my law-studies. 



LINCOLN'S THREE GREAT POLITICAL 
SPEECHES. 

Three speeches have been chosen to represent Mr. 
Lincoln in the political field: Springfield, June 16, 1858; 
Chicago, July 10, 1858; Cooper Union, February 27, 
i860. They present, when taken together, not only 
his own political faith, but "a body of Republic- 
an doctrine" which can scarce anywhere be equaled. 
Two of them, the first and third, show him at his 
best, for they were, probably, the most carefully 
prepared speeches of his life. The first struck the key- 
note of the great contest which ended in the downfall 
of slavery, and was the text from which Lincoln 
departed but little in his great debate with Douglas the 
same year. The third is a tremendous summary of 
the situation in i860 and presents Lincoln's ripest and 
fullest thought upon that situation. Of this speech 
Mr. Greeley afterwards said, "I do not hesitate to pro- 
nounce it the very best political address to which I 
ever listened — and I have heard some of Webster's 
grandest." The whole history of slavery in this 



SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 27 

country is contained in these speeches and set forth 
with transparent clearness. "The (Cooper Union) 
speech is worthy of great praise, and ought to be read 
entire by him who would fully understand the history 
of the year i860."* — Ed. 



SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 

(Delivered June 16, iS^S, at the close of the Republican State 
Convention, by which Mr. Li7icoln was nominated for 
United States Senator.) 

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Conven- 
tion: — If we could first know where we are, and 
whither we are tending, we could better judge what to 
do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth 
year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object 
and confident promise of putting an end to slavery 
agitation. Under the operation of that policy that 
agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly 
augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a 
crisis shall have been reached and passed. "A house 
divided against itself can not stand." I believe this 
Government can not endure permanently half slave 
and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dis- 
solved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do 
expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all 
one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of 

*Rhodes, Vol. II., p. 431. 



28 SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 

slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it 
where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is 
in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will 
push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all 
the States, old as well as new, North as well as South. 

Have we no tendency to the latter condition? Let 
any one who doubts carefully contemplate that now 
almost complete legal combination — piece of machin- 
ery, so to speak — compounded of the Nebraska doctrine* 
and the Dred Scott decision. Let him consider not 
only what work the machinery is adapted to do, and 
how well adapted ; but also let him study the history of 
its construction, and trace, if he can, or rather fail, if he 
can, to trace the evidences of design and concert of 
action among its chief master- workers from the begin- 
ning. 

The new year of 1854 found slavery excluded from 
more than half the States by State Constitutions, and 
from most of the national territory by Congressional 
prohibition. Four days later commenced the struggle 
which ended in repealing that Congressional prohibi- 
tion. This opened all the national territory to slavery, 
and was the first point gained. 

But, so far, Congress only had acted ; and an indorse- 
ment by the people, real or apparent, was indispensable 
to save the point already gained and give chance for 
more. This necessity had not been overlooked, but had 



*The Kansas-Nebraska Bill, approved by President Pierce May 
30, 1S54. 



SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 29 

been provided for, as well as might be, in the notable 
argument of " squatter sovereignty," otherwise called 
"sacred right of self-government," which latter 
phrase, though expressive of the only rightful basis of 
any government, was so perverted in this attempted 
use of it as to amount to just this: that if any one man 
choose to enslave another, no third man shall be 
allowed to object. That argument was incorporated 
into the Nebraska Bill itself, in the language which 
follows: "It being the true intent and meaning of 
act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, 
nor to exclude it therefrom ; but to leave the people 
thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their 
domestic institutions in their own way. subject or. 
the Constitution of the United St.. 

Then opened the roar of loose declamation in favor 
of ''squatter sovereignty" and "sacred right of self- 
government." 

"But," said opposition members, "let us amend the 
bill so as to expressly declare that the people of the 
territory may exclude slavery.'" "X : we," said the 
friends of the measure; and down they voted the 
amendment 

While the Nebraska Bill was passing through Con- 
gress, a law case involving the question of a k. 
freedom, by reason of his owner having voluntarily 
taken him first into a free State and then a territory 
covered by the Congressional prohibition, and held him 
as a slave for a long time in each, was passing through 



30 SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 

the U. S. Circuit Court for the District of Missouri 
and both the Nebraska Bill and law suit were brought 
to a decision in the same month of May, 1854. The 
negro's name was "Dred Scott," which name now 
designates the decision finally made in the case. 

Before the then next Presidential election, the law 
case came to and was argued in the Supreme Court of 
the United States ; but the decision of it was deferred 
until after the election. Still, before the election, 
Senator Trumbull, on the floor of the Senate, requested 
the leading advocate of the Nebraska Bill to state his 
opinion whether the people of a territory can constitu- 
tionally exclude slavery from their limits; and the 
latter answered, "That is a question for the Supreme 
Court." 

The election came. Mr. Buchanan was elected, and 
the indorsement, such as it was, secured. That was 
the second point gained. The indorsement, however, 
fell short of a clear popular majority by nearly four 
hundred thousand votes, and so, perhaps, was not 
overwhelmingly reliable and satisfactory. The out- 
going President, in his last annual message, as impress- 
ively as possible echoed back upon the people the 
weight and authority of the indorsement. 

The Supreme Court met again; did not announce 
their decision, but ordered a re-argument. The Presi- 
dential inauguration came, and still no decision of the 
court; but the incoming President in his Inaugural 
Address fervently exhorted the people to abide by the 



SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 3 1 

forthcoming decision, whatever it might be. Then, in 
a few days came the decision. 

This was the third point gained. 

The reputed author of the Nebraska Bill finds an 
early occasion to make a speech at this capitol indors- 
ing the Dred Scott decision, and vehemently denounc- 
ing all opposition to it. The new President, too, seizes 
an early occasion to indorse and strongly construe that 
decision, and to express his astonishment that any 
different view had ever been entertained! 

At length a squabble springs up between the Presi- 
dent and the author of the Nebraska Bill, on the mere 
question of fact, whether the Lecompton Constitution* 
was or was not, in any just sense, made by the people of 
Kansas; and in that quarrel the latter declares that all 
he wants is a fair vote for the people, and that he 
cares not whether slavery be voted down or voted up. 
I do not understand his declaration that he cares not 
whether slavery be voted down or voted up to be 
intended by him other than as an apt definition of the 
policy he would impress upon the public mind — the 
principle for which he declares he has suffered much, 
and is ready to suffer to the end. 

And well may he cling to that principle. If he has 

any parental feeling, well may he cling to it. That 

principle is the only shred left of his original Nebraska 

* The State Constitution made for Kansas by the pro-slavery 
men of the State in 1857. It was adopted by them "with slavery" 
December 21, of that year, and rejected by the anti-slavery men of 
the State, January 4, 1858. By a vote of the whole State' August 
3, 1858, it was finally rejected. 



32 SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 

doctrine. Under the Dred Scott decision "squatter 
sovereignty" squatted out of existence, tumbled down 
like temporary scaffolding, — like the mould at the 
foundry, served through one blast and fell back into 
loose sand, — helped to carry an election, and then was 
kicked to the winds. His late joint struggle with the 
Republicans against the Lecompton Constitution 
involves nothing of the original Nebraska doctrine. 
That struggle was made on a point — the right of a 
people to make their own Constitution — upon which he 
and the Republicans have never differed. 

The several points of the Dred Scott decision, in 
connection with Senator Douglas's "care not" policy, 
constitute the piece of machinery in its present state of 
advancement. The working points of that machinery 
are: 

(i) That no negro slave, imported as such from 
Africa, and no descendant of such slave, can ever be 
a citizen of any State, in the sense of that term as 
used in the Constitution of the United States. 

This point is made in order to deprive the negro in 
every possible event of the benefit of this provision 
of the United States Constitution which declares that, 
"The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the 
privileges and immunities of citizens in the several 
States." 

(2) That, "subject to the Constitution of the United 
States," neither Congress nor a Territorial Legislature 
can exclude slavery from any United States Territory. 



SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 33 

This point is made in order that individual men may 
fill up the Territories with slaves, without danger of 
losing them as property, and thus enhance the chances 
of permanency to the institution through all the 
future. 

(3) That whether the holding a negro in actual 
slavery in a free State makes him free as against 
the holder, the United States courts will not decide, 
but will leave it to be decided by the courts of any 
slave State the negro may be forced into by the 
master. 

This point is made not to be pressed immediately, 
but, if acquiesced in for a while, and apparently 
indorsed by the people at an election, then to sustain 
the logical conclusion that what Dred Scott's master 
might lawfully do with Dred Scott in the free State of 
Illinois, every other master may lawfully do with any 
other one or one thousand slaves in Illinois or in any 
other free State. 

Auxiliary to all this, and working hand in hand with 
it, the Nebraska doctrine, or what is left of it, is to 
educate and mould public opinion, at least Northern 
public opinion, not to care whether slavery is voted 
down or voted up. This shows exactly where we now 
are, and partially, also, whither we are tending. 

It will throw additional light on the latter, to go 
back and run the mind over the string of historical 
facts already stated. Several things will now appear 
less dark and mysterious than they did when they were 



34 SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 

transpiring. The people were to be left "perfectly 
free," "subject only to the Constitution." What the 
Constitution had to do with it outsiders could not then 
see. Plainly enough now, it was an exactly fitted 
niche for the Dred Scott decision afterward to come in, 
and declare that perfect freedom of the people to be 
just no freedom at all. Why was the amendment 
expressly declaring the right of the people to exclude 
slavery voted down? Plainly enough now, the adoption 
of it would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott 
decision. Why was the court decision held up? Why 
even a Senator's individual opinion withheld till after 
the Presidential election? Plainly enough now, the 
speaking out then would have damaged the "perfectly 
free" argument upon which the election was to be 
carried. Why the outgoing President's felicitation on 
the indorsement? Why the delay of a re-argument? 
Why the incoming President's advance exhortation in 
favor of the decision? These things look like the 
cautious patting and petting of a spirited horse 
preparatory to mounting him, when it is dreaded that 
he may give the rider a fall. And why the hasty 
after-indorsement of the decision, by the President and 
others? 

We cannot absolutely know that all these exact 
adaptations are the result of pre-concert. But when 
we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of 
which we know have been gotten out at different times 
and places and by different workmen, — Stephen, 



SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 35 

Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance,* — and when 
we see these timbers joined together, and see they 
exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the 
tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths 
and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted 
to their respective places, and not a piece too many or 
too few, not omitting even scaffolding — or, if a single 
piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly 
fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in — in such a 
case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen 
and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one 
another from the beginning, and all worked upon a 
common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow 
was struck. 

It should not be overlooked that, by the Nebraska 
bill, the people of a State as well as Territory were to 
be left "perfectly free," "subject only to the Constitu- 
tion." Why mention a State? They were legislating 
for Territories, and not for or about States. Certainly 
the people of a State are and ought to be subject to the 
Constitution of the United States; but why is mention 
of this lugged into this merely territorial law? Why 
are the people of a Territory and the people of a State 
therein lumped together, and their relation to the 
Constitution therein treated as being precisely the 
same? While the opinion of the court, by Chief Justice 
Taney, in the Dred Scott case, and the separate 



* Stephen A. Douglas, Franklin Pierce, Roger B. Taney, and 
Janus Buchanan. 



36 SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 

opinions of all the concurring judges, expressly declare 
that the Constitution of the United States neither per- 
mits Congress nor a Territorial Legislature to exclude 
slavery from any United States Territory, they all 
omit to declare whether or not the same Constitution 
permits a State, or the people of a State, to exclude it. 
Possibly, this was a mere omission ; but who can be 
quite sure, if McLean or Curtis* had sought to get into 
the opinion a declaration of unlimited power in the 
people of a State to exclude slavery from their limits, 
just as Chase and Mace sought to get such declaration, 
in behalf of the people of a Territory, into the 
Nebraska bill — I ask, who can be quite sure that it 
would not have been voted down, in the one case as it 
had been in the other? The nearest approach to the 
point of declaring the power of a State over slavery, is 
made by Judge Nelson. He approaches it more than 
once, using the precise idea, and almost the language 
too, of the Nebraska Act. On one occasion his exact 
language is: "except in cases where the power is 
restrained by the Constitution of the United States, the 
law of the State is supreme over the subject of slavery 
within its jurisdiction." In what cases the power of 
the State is so restrained by the United States Consti- 
tution is left an open question, precisely as the same 
question as to the restraint on the power of the Terri- 
tories was left open in the Nebraska Act. Put this and 



* McLean, Curtis and Nelson, judges of the Supreme Court of 
the United States at this time. 



SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 37 

that together, and we have another nice little niche, 
which we may, ere long, see filled with another 
Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitu- 
tion of the United States does not permit a State to 
exclude slavery from its limits. And this may espe- 
cially be expected if the doctrine of "care not whether 
slavery be voted down or voted up" shall gain upon 
the public mind sufficiently to give promise that such a 
decision can be maintained when made. 

Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being 
alike lawful in all the States. Welcome, or unwel- 
come, such decision is probably coming, and will soon 
be upon us, unless the power of the present political 
dynasty shall be met and overthrown. We shall lie 
down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri 
are on the verge of making their State free, and we 
shall awake to the reality instead that the Supreme 
Court has made Illinois a slave State. To meet and 
overthrow the power of that dynasty is the work now 
before all those who would prevent that consumma- 
tion. That is what we have to do. How can we 
best do it? 

There are those who denounce us openly to their 
own friends, and yet whisper us softly that Senator 
Douglas is the aptest instrument there is with which to 
effect that object. They do not tell us, nor has he told 
us, that he wishes any such object to be effected. 
They wish us to infer all from the facts that he now 
has a little quarrel with the present head of the 



38 SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 

dynasty ; and that he has regularly voted with us on a 
single point upon which he and we have never differed. 
They remind us that he is a very great man, and that 
the largest of us are very small ones. Let this be 
granted. But "a living dog is better than a dead 
lion." Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion for this 
work, is at least a caged and toothless one. How can 
he oppose the advances of slavery? He don't care 
anything about it. His avowed mission is impressing 
the "public heart" to care nothing about it. A lead- 
ing Douglas Democrat newspaper thinks Douglas's 
superior talent will be needed to resist the revival of 
the African slave-trade. Does Douglas believe an 
effort to revive that trade is approaching? He has not 
said so. Does he really think so? But if it is, how 
can he resist it? For years he has labored to prove it 
a sacred right of white men to take negro slaves into 
the new Territories. Can he possibly show that it is less 
a sacred right to buy them where they can be bought 
cheapest? And unquestionably they can be bought 
cheaper in Africa than in Virginia. He has done all in 
his power to reduce the whole question of slavery to 
one of a mere right of property ; and, as such, how can 
he oppose the foreign slave-trade? How can he refuse 
that trade in that "property" shall be "perfectly free," 
unless he does it as a protection to the home produc- 
tion? And as the home producers will probably not 
ask the protection, he will be wholly without a ground 
of opposition. 



SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS. 39 

Senator Douglas holds, we know, that a man may 
rightfully be wiser to-day than he was yesterday — that 
he may rightfully change when he finds himself wrong. 
But can we for that reason run ahead, and infer that 
he will make any particular change of which he him- 
self has given no intimation? Can we safely base our 
action upon any such vague inferences? Xow, as ever, 
I wish not to misrepresent Judge Douglas's position, 
question his motives, or do aught that can be person- 
ally offensive to him. Whenever, if ever, he and we 
can come together on principle, so that our great cause 
may have assistance from his great ability, I hope to 
have interposed no adventitious obstacle. But clearly, 
he is not now with us — he does not pretend to be — he 
does not promise ever to be. 

Our cause, then, must be intrusted to, and conducted 
by, its own undoubted friends — those whose hands are 
free, whose hearts are in the work, who do care for the 
result. Two years ago the Republicans of the nation 
mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We 
did this under the single impulse of resistance to a 
common danger, with every external circumstance 
against us. Of strange, discordant, and even hostile 
elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed 
and fought the battle through, under the constant hot 
fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did 
we brave all then to falter now? — now, when that 
same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? 
The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail — if we 



40 LINCOLN S RULE OF POLITICAL ACTION. 

stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may 
accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the 
victor}- is sure to come. 



LINCOLN'S RULE OF POLITICAL ACTION. 

Lincoln's whole life was a calculation of the law of 
forces and ultimate results. The whole world to him 
was a question of cause and effect. He believed 
the results to which certain causes tended; he did not 
believe that those results could be materially hastened 
or impeded. His whole political history, especially 
since the agitation of the slavery question, has been 
based upon this theory. He believed from the first, I 
think, that the agitation of slavery would produce its 
overthrow, and he acted upon the result as though it 
were present from the beginning. His tactics were to 
get himself into the right place and remain there still, 
until events would find him in that place. This course 
of action led him to say and do things which could not 
be understood when considered in reference to the 
immediate surroundings in ^vhich they were done or 
said. You will remember, in his campaign against 
Douglas in 1S5S, the first ten lines of the first speech 
he made defeated him. The sentiment of the "house 
divided against itself" seemed wholly inappropriate. 
It was a speech made at the commencement of a cam- 
paign, and apparently made for the campaign. View- 



LINCOLN'S RULE OF POLITICAL ACTION'. 41 

ing it in this light alone, nothing could have been more 
unfortunate or inappropriate. It was saying just the 
wrong thing ; yet he saw it was an abstract truth, and 
standing by the speech would ultimately find him in 
the right place. I was inclined at the time to believe 
these words were hastily and inconsiderately uttered, 
but subsequent facts have convinced me they were 
deliberate and had been matured. . . 

In the summer of 1S59, when he was dining with a 
party of his intimate friends at Bloomington, the sub- 
ject of his Springfield speech was discussed. We all 
insisted it was a great mistake, but he justified himself, 
and finally said, "Well, gentlemen, you may think 
that speech was a mistake, but I never have believed it 
was, and you will see the day when you will consider 
it was the wisest thing I ever said. ' ' 

He never believed in political combinations, and 
consequently, whether an individual man or class of 
men supported or opposed him, never made any 
difference in his feelings, or his opinions of his own 
success. If he was elected, he seemed to believe that 
no person or class of persons could ever have defeated 
him, and if defeated, he believed nothing could ever 
have elected him. Hence, when he was a candidate, 
he never wanted anything done for him in the line of 
political combination or management. He seemed to 
want to let the whole subject alone, and for everybody 
else to do the same. 



42 LINCOLN AS AN ORATOR. 

He saw that the pressure of a campaign was the 
external force coercing the party into unity. If it 
failed to produce that result, he believed any individual 
effort would also fail. If the desired result followed, 
he considered it attributable to the great cause, and 
not aided by the lesser ones. He sat down in his 
chair in Springfield and made himself the Mecca to 
which all politicians made pilgrimages. He told them 
all a story, said nothing, and sent them away. 

Leonard Swett. 

From "Herndon's Life of Lincoln." 



LINCOLN AS AN ORATOR. 

A brief description of Mr. Lincoln's appearance on 
the stump and of his manner when speaking may not 
be without interest. When standing erect he was six 
feet four inches high. He was lean in flesh and 
ungainly in figure. Aside from the sad, pained look 
due to habitual melancholy, his face had no character- 
istic or fixed expression. He was thin through the 
chest, and hence slightly stoop-shouldered. When he 
arose to address courts, juries, or crowds of people, his 
body inclined forward to a slight degree. At first he 
was very awkward, and it seemed a real labor to adjust 
himself to his surroundings. He struggled for a time 
under a feeling of apparent diffidence and sensitive- 
ness, and these only added to his awkwardness. I 



LINCOLN AS AN ORATOR. 43 

have often seen and sympathized with Mr. Lincoln 
during these moments. When he began speaking, his 
voice was shrill, piping, and unpleasant. His manner, 
his attitude, his dark, yellow face, wrinkled and dry, 
his oddity of pose, his diffident movements — every- 
thing seemed to be against him, but only for a short 
time. After having arisen, he generally placed his 
hands behind him, the back of his left hand in the 
palm of his right, the thumb and fingers of his 
right hand clasped around the left arm at the wrist. 
For a few moments he played the combination of awk- 
wardness, sensitiveness, and diffidence. As he pro- 
ceeded he became somewhat animated, and to keep in 
harmony with his growing warmth his hands relaxed 
their grasp and fell to his side. Presently he clasped 
them in front of him, interlocking his fingers, one 
thumb meanwhile chasing another. His speech now 
requiring more emphatic utterance, his fingers unlocked 
and his hands fell apart. His left arm was thrown 
behind, the back of his hand resting against his body, 
his right hand seeking his side. By this time he had 
gained sufficient composure, and his real speech began. 
He did not gesticulate as much with his hands as with 
his head. He used the latter frequently, throwing it 
with vim this way and that. This movement was a 
significant one when he sought to enforce his state- 
ment. It sometimes came with a quick jerk, as if 
throwing off electric sparks into combirstible material. 
He never sawed the air nor rent space into tatters and 



44 LINCOLN AS AN ORATOR. 

rags, as some orators do. He never acted for stage 
effect. He was cool, considerate, reflective — in time 
self-possessed and self-reliant. His style was clear, 
terse, and compact. In argument he was logical, 
demonstrative, and fair. He was careless of his dress, 
and his clothes, instead of fitting neatly as did the 
garments of Douglas on the latter's well-rounded form, 
hung loosely on his giant frame. As he moved along 
in his speech he became freer and less imeasy in his 
movements; to that extent he was graceful. He had 
a perfect naturalness, a strong individuality; and to 
that extent he was dignified. He despised glitter, 
show, set forms, and shams. He spoke with effective- 
ness and to move the judgment as well as the emotions 
of men. There was a world of meaning and emphasis 
in the long, bony finger of his right hand as he dotted 
the ideas on the minds of his hearers. Sometimes, to 
express joy or pleasure, he would raise both hands at 
an angle of about fifty degrees, the palms upward, as 
if desirous of embracing the spirit of that which he 
loved. If the sentiment was one of detestation — 
denunciation of slavery, for example — both arms, 
thrown upward and fists clenched, swept through the 
air, and he expressed an execration that was truly 
sublime. This was one of his most effective gestures, 
and signified most vividly a fixed determination to drag 
down the object of his hatred and trample it in the 
dust. He always stood squarely on his feet, toe even 
with toe; that is, he never put one foot before the 



SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 45 

other. He neither touched nor leaned on anything for 
support. He made but few changes in his positions 
and attitudes. He never ranted, never walked back- 
ward and forward on the platform. To ease his arms 
he frequently caught hold, with his left hand, of the 
lapel of his coat, keeping his thumb iipright and leav- 
ing his right hand free to gesticulate. The designer 
of the monument recently erected in Chicago has 
happily caught him in just this attitude. As he pro- 
ceeded with his speech the exercise of his vocal organs 
altered somewhat the tone of his voice. It lost, in a 
measure, its former acute and shrilling pitch, and mel- 
lowed into a more harmonious and pleasant sound. 
His form expanded, and, notwithstanding the sunken 
breast, he rose up a splendid and imposing figure. 

Such was Lincoln the orator. 

Wm. H. Herndon. 
From "-Life of Lincoln." 



SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 

{Delivered at Chicago, July 10, /SjS.) 

My Fellow-Citizens-. — On yesterday evening, upon 
the occasion of the reception given to Senator Douglas, 
I was furnished with a seat very convenient for hear- 
ing him, and was otherwise very courteously treated 
by him and his friends, for which I thank him and 
them. During the course of his remarks my name was 
mentioned in such a way as, I suppose, renders it at 



46 SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 

least not improper that I should make some sort of 
reply to him. I shall not attempt to follow him in the 
precise order in which he addressed the assembled 
multitude upon that occasion, though I shall perhaps 
do so in the main. 

Popular sovereignty! everlasting popular sover- 
eignty! Let us for a moment inquire into this vast 
matter of popular sovereignty. What is popular 
sovereignty? We recollect that in an early period in 
the history of this struggle, there was another name 
for the same thing, — Squatter Sovereignty. It was not 
exactly Popular Sovereignty, but Squatter Sovereignty. 
What do those terms mean? What do those terms 
mean when used now? And vast credit is taken by 
our friend the Judge in regard to his support of it, 
when he declares the last years of his life have been, 
and all the future years of his life shall be, devoted to 
this matter of popular sovereignty. What is it? Why, 
it is the sovereignty of the people ! What was Squatter 
Sovereignty? I suppose if it had any significance at 
all, it was the right of the people to govern them- 
selves, to be sovereign in their own affairs while they 
were squatted down in a country not their own, while 
they had squatted on a Territory that did not belong to 
them, in the sense that a State belongs to the people 
who inhabit it, — when it belonged to the nation; such 
right to govern themselves was called "Squatter 
Sovereignty." 

Now, I wish you to mark. What has become of that 



SPEECH Df REPLY TO SENATOR DOUG I 

Squatter Sovereignty? "What has become of 
you get anybody to tell you now that the people of a 
Territory have any authority to govern themselv-. 
regard to this mooted question of slavery, before 
form a State Constitution? No such thing at all, 
although there is a general running fire, and although 
there has been a hurrah made in every speech on that 
side, assuming that policy had given the people 
Territory the right to govern then:-/ ss v.pon this 
question; yet the point is dodged. To-d^v -been 

decided — no more than a year ago it was decided by 
the Supreme Court of the United States, and is 
insisted upon to-day — that the people of a Territory 
have no right to exclude slavery from a Territory ; that 
if any one man chooses to take slaves into a Terr:, 
all of the rest of the people have no right to keep them 
out. This being so, and this decision being made one 
of the points that the Judge approved, and one in the 
approval of which he says he means to keep me down, 
— put me down I should not say, for I have never been 
up. He says he is in favor of it, anc to it, and 

expects to win his battle on that decision, which 
that there is no such thing as Squatter Sovereignty, 
but that anyone man may take slaves into a Territory, 
and all the other men in the Territory may be opposed 
to it, and yet, by reason of the Constitution, they can- 
not prohibit it. When that is so, how much is left of 
this vast matter of Squatter Sovereignty I should like 
to know? [A voice — "It is all gone." 



48 SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 

Again, when we get to the question of the right of 
the people to form a State Constitution as they please, 
to form it with slavery or without slavery, — if that is 
anything new, I confess I don't know it. Has there 
ever been a time when anybody said that any other 
than the people of a Territory itself should form a 
Constitution? What is now in it that Judge Douglas 
should have fought several years of his life, and 
pledged himself to fight all the remaining years of his 
life for? Can Judge Douglas find anybody on earth 
that said that anybody else should form a Constitution 
for a people? [A voice — "Yes."] Well, I should like 
you to name him, I should like to know who he was. 
[Same voice — "John Calhoun."] 

No, Sir, I never heard of even John Calhoun saying 
such a thing. He insisted on the same principle as 
Judge Douglas; but his mode of applying it, in fact, 
was wrong. It is enough for my purpose to ask this 
crowd when a Republican ever said anything against 
it. They never said anything against it, but they have 
constantly spoken for it; and whosoever will under- 
take to examine the platform, and the speeches of 
responsible men of the party, and of irresponsible men, 
too, if you please, will be unable to find one word from 
anybody in the Republican ranks opposed to that 
Popular Sovereignty which Judge Douglas thinks that 
he has invented. I suppose that Judge Douglas will 
claim, in a little while, that he is the inventor of the 
idea that the people should govern themselves; that 



SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 49 

nobody ever thought of such a thing until he brought it 
forward. We do not remember, I suppose, that in that 
old Declaration of Independence it is said that, "We 
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are 
created equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator 
with certain inalienable rights; that among these are 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to se- 
cure these rights, governments are instituted among 
men, deriving their just powers from the consent of 
the governed. " There is the origin of the Popular 
Sovereignty. Who, then, shall come in at this day and 
claim that he invented it? 

Judge Douglas made two points upon my recent 
speech at Springfield. He says they are to be the 
issues of this campaign. The first one of these points 
he bases upon the language in a speech which I deliv- 
ered at Springfield, which I believe I can quote cor- 
rectly from memory. I said there that, "We are now 
far on in the fifth year since a policy was instituted for 
the avowed object and with the confident promise of 
putting an end to slavery agitation ; under the opera- 
tion of that policy, that agitation had not only not 
ceased, but had constantly augmented." "I believe it 
will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached 
and passed. A house divided against itself cannot 
stand. I believe this Government cannot endure per- 
manently, half slave and half free. I do not expect 
the Union to be dissolved," — I am quoting from my 
speech, — "I do not expect the house to fall, but I do 



50 SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 

expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all 
one thing- or all the other. Either the opponents of 
slavery will arrest the spread of it and place it where 
the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in 
the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will 
push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all 
the States, North as well as South." 

In this paragraph, which I have quoted in your 
hearing, and to which I ask the attention of all, Judge 
Douglas thinks he discovers great political heresy. I 
want your attention particularly to what he has 
inferred from it. He says I am in favor of making all 
the States of this Union uniform in all their internal 
regulations; that in all their domestic concerns I am 
in favor of making them entirely uniform. He draws 
this inference from the language I have quoted to you. 
He says that I am in favor of making war by the North 
upon the South for the extinction of slavery , that I am 
also in favor of inviting (as he expresses it) the South 
to a war upon the North for the purpose of nationaliz- 
ing slavery. Now, it is singular enough, if you will 
carefully read that passage over, that I did not say that I 
was in favor of anything in it. I only said what I 
expected would take place. I made a prediction only, 
— it may have been a foolish one, perhaps. I did not 
even say that I desired that slavery should be put in 
course of ultimate extinction. I do say so now, how- 
ever, so there need be no longer any difficulty about 
that. It may be written down in the next speech. 



SPEECH IN' REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 5 1 

Gentlemen, Judge Douglas informed you that this 
speech of mine was probably carefully prepared. I 
admit that it was. I am not master of language; I 
have not a fine education ; I am not capable of enter- 
ing into a disquisition upon dialects, as I believe you 
call it; but I do not believe the language I employed 
bears any such construction as Judge Douglas puts 
upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to 
words. I know what I meant, and I will not leave 
this crowd in doubt, if I can explain it to them, what I 
really meant in the use of that paragraph. 

I am not, in the first place, unaware that this Govern- 
ment has endured eighty-two years half slave and half 
free. I know that. I am tolerably well acquainted 
with the history of the country, and I know that it has 
endured eighty-two years half slave and half free. I 
believe — and that is what I meant to allude to there — I 
believe it has endured, because during all that time, 
until the introduction of the Nebraska bill, the public 
mind did rest all the time in the belief that slavery 
was in course of ultimate extinction. That was what 
gave us the rest that we had through that period of 
eighty-two years, — at least, so I believe. I have 
always hated slavery, I think, as much as any Aboli- 
tionist, — I have been an Old Line Whig, — I have 
always hated it ; but I have always been quiet about it 
until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska 
bill began. I always believed that everybody was 
against it, and that it was in course of ultimate extinc- 



52 SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 

tion. The great mass of the Nation have rested in the 
belief that slavery was in course of ultimate extinc- 
tion. They had reason so to believe. 

The adoption of the Constitution and its attendant 
history led the people to believe so; and that such was 
the belief of the framers of the Constitution. Why 
did those old men, about the time of the adoption of 
the Constitution, decree that slavery should not go into 
the new territory, where it had not already gone? 
Why declare that within twenty years the African 
Slave Trade, by which slaves are supplied, might be 
cut off by Congress? Why were all these acts? I 
might enumerate more of these acts; but enough. 
What were they but a clear indication that the framers 
of the Constitution intended and expected the ultimate 
extinction of that institution? And now, when I say, 
as I said in my speech that Judge Douglas has quoted 
from, when I say that I think the opponents of slavery 
will resist the farther spread of it, and place it where 
the public mind shall rest with the belief that it is in 
course of ultimate extinction, I only mean to say that 
they will place it where the founders of this Govern- 
ment originally placed it. 

I have said a hundred times, and I have no inclina- 
tion to take it back, that I believe there is no right, 
and ought to be no inclination, in the people of the 
Free States to enter into the Slave States, and inter- 
fere with the question of slavery at all. I have said 
that always; Judge Douglas has heard me say it, if 



SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 53 

not quite a hundred times, at least as good as a hundred 
times; and when it is said that I am in favor of inter- 
fering with slavery where it exists, I know that it is 
unwarranted by anything I have ever intended, and, as 
I believe, by anything I have ever said. If, by any 
means, I have ever used language which could fairly 
be so construed (as, however, I believe I never have), 
I now correct it. 

So much, then, for the inference that Judge Douglas 
draws, that I am in favor of setting the sections at war 
with one another. I know that I never meant any 
such thing, and I believe that no fair mind can infer 
any such thing from anything I have ever said. 

Now, in relation to his inference that I am in favor 
of a general consolidation of all the local institutions of 
the various States. I will attend to that for a little 
while, and try to inquire, if I can, how on earth it 
could be that any man could draw such an inference 
from anything I said. I have said, very many times, 
in Judge Douglas's hearing, that no man believed 
more than I in the principle of self-government; that 
it lies at the bottom of all my ideas of just govern- 
ment, from beginning to end. I have denied that his 
use of that term applies properly. But for the thing 
itself, I deny that any man has ever gone ahead of me 
in his devotion to the principle, whatever he may have 
done in efficiency in advocating it. I think that I have 
said it in your hearing, that I believe each individual 
is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself 



54 SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 

and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise inter- 
feres with any other man's rights; that each com- 
munity, as a State, has a right to do exactly as it 
pleases with all the concerns within that State that 
interfere with the right of no other State, and that the 
General Government, upon principle, has no right to 
interfere with anything other than that general class of 
things that does concern the whole. I have said that 
at all times. I have said, as illustrations, that I do 
not believe in the right of Illinois to interfere with the 
cranberry laws of Indiana, the oyster laws of Virginia, 
or the liquor laws of Maine. I have said these things 
over and over again, and I repeat them here as my 
sentiments. . . 

A little now on the other point, — the Dred Scott 
decision. Another of the issues he says that is to be 
made with me is upon his devotion to the Dred Scott 
decision, and my opposition to it. 

I have expressed heretofore, and I now repeat, my 
opposition to the Dred Scott decision ; but I should be 
allowed to state the nature of that opposition, and I 
ask your indulgence while I do so. What is fairly 
implied by the term Judge Douglas has used, "resist- 
ance to the decision"? I do not resist it. If I wanted 
to take Dred Scott from his master, I would be inter- 
fering with property, and that terrible difficulty that 
Judge Douglas speaks of, of interfering with property, 
would arise. But I am doing no such thing as that, 
but all that I am doing is refusing to obey it as a polit- 



SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 55 

ical rule. If I were in Congress, and a vote should 
come up on a question whether slavery should be 
prohibited in a new Territory, in spite of the Dred 
Scott decision, I would vote that it should. 

That is what I would do. Judge Douglas said last 
night that before the decision he might advance his 
opinion and it might be contrary to the decision when 
it was made ; but after it was made he would abide 
by it until it was reversed. Just so! We let this 
property abide by the decision, but we will try to 
reverse that decision. [Loud applause.] We will try 
to put it where Judge Douglas will not object, for he 
says he will obey it until it is reversed. Somebody 
has to reverse that decision, since it was made, and we 
mean to reverse it, and we mean to do it peaceably. 

What are the uses of decisions of courts? They 
have two uses. As rules of property they have two 
uses. First, they decide upon the question before the 
court. They decide in this case that Dred Scott is a 
slave. Nobody resists that. Not only that, but they 
say to everybody else, that persons standing just as 
Dred Scott stands, is as he is. That is, they say that 
when a question comes up upon another person, it will 
be so decided again, unless the court decides in another 
way, unless the court overrules its decision. Well, we 
mean to do what we can to have the court decide the 
other way. That is one thing we mean to try to do. 

We were often, — more than once, at least, — in the 
course of Judge Douglas's speech last night, reminded 



56 SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 

that this Government was made for white men ; that he 
believed it was made for white men. Well, that is 
putting - it into a shape in which no one wants to deny 
it; but the Judge then goes into his passion for draw- 
ing inferences that are not warranted. I protest, now 
and forever, against that counterfeit logic which pre- 
sumes that because I did not want a negro woman for 
a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife. My 
understanding is that I need not have her for either ; 
but, as God made us separate, we can leave one another 
alone, and do one another much good thereby. There 
are white men enough to marry all the white women, 
and enough black men to marry all the black women ; 
and in God's name let them be so married. The Judge 
regales us with the terrible enormities that take place 
by the mixture of races; that the inferior race bears 
the superior down. Why, Judge, if we do not let 
them get together in the Territories they won't mix 
there. 

We are now a mighty nation ; we are thirty, or about 
thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit 
about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole 
earth. We run our memory back over the pages of 
history for about eighty-two years, and we discover 
that we were then a very small people in point of num- 
bers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly 
less extent of country, with vastly less of everything 
we deem desirable among men; we look upon the 
change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our 



SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 57 

posterity, and we fix upon something that happened 
away back, as in some way or other being connected 
with this rise of posterity. We find a race of men liv- 
ing in that day. whom we claim as our fathers and 
grandfathers; they were iron men ; they fought for the 
principle that they were contending for; and we 
understood that by what they then did it has followed 
that the degree of prosperity which we now enjoy has 
come to us. We hold this annual celebration to 
remind ourselves of all the good done in this process 
of time, of how it was done and who did it, and how 
we are historically connected with it; and we go from 
these meetings in better humor with ourselves, we 
feel more attached the one to the other, and more 
firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way 
we are better men in the age and race and country in 
which we live, for these celebrations. But after we 
have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. 
There is something else connected with it. We have 
besides these, men descended by blood from our 
ancestors — those among us, perhaps half our people, 
who are not descendants at all of these men ; they are 
men who have come from Europe, — German, Irish, 
French, and Scandinavian, — men that have come from 
Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come 
hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals 
in all things. If they look back through this history 
to trace their connection with those days by blood, 
they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves 



58 SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 

back into that glorious epoch and make themselves 
feel that they are part of us; but when they look 
through that old Declaration of Independence, they 
find that those old men say that, !'We hold these 
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created 
equal;" and then they feel that that moral sentiment, 
taught in that day, evidences their relation to those 
men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, 
and that they have a right to claim it as though they 
were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the 
men who wrote that Declaration; and so they are. 
That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links 
the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, 
that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love 
of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the 
world. 

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with 
this idea of "don't care if slavery is voted up or voted 
down," for sustaining the Dred Scott decision, for 
holding that the Declaration of Independence did not 
mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving 
his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence 
means, and we have him saying that the people of 
America are equal to the people of England. Accord- 
ing to his construction, you Germans are not connected 
with it. Now, I ask you in all soberness, if all these 
things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and 
indorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to 
them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty 



SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 59 

in the country, and to transform this GoveiTiment into 
a government of some other form. Those arguments 
that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated 
with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoy- 
ing; that as much is to be done for them as their con- 
dition will allow, — what are these arguments? They 
are the arguments that Kings have made for enslaving 
the people in all ages of the world. You will find that 
all the arguments in favor of King-craft were of this 
class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, 
not that they wanted to do it, but because the people 
were better off for being ridden. That is their argu- 
ment, and this argument of the Judge is the same old 
serpent that says, "You work, and I eat; you toil, and 
I will enjoy the fruits of it." Turn it whatever way 
you will, whether it come from the mouth of a King, 
an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or 
from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for 
enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old 
serpent; and I hold, if that coiirse of argumentation 
that is made for the purpose of convincing the public 
mind that we should not care about this, should be 
granted, it does not stop with the negro. 1 should like 
to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independ- 
ence, which declares that all men are equal upon prin- 
ciple, you begin making exceptions to it, where you 
will stop? If one man says it does not mean a negro, 
why not another say it does not mean some other 
man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get 



6o SPEECH IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS. 

the statute book in which we find it, and tear it out! 
Who is so bold as to do it? If it is not true, let us tear 
it out! [cries of "No, no."] Let us stick to it, then; 
let us stand firmly by it then. 

It may be argued that there are certain conditions 
that make necessities and impose them upon us; and 
to the extent that a necessity is imposed upon a man, 
he must submit to it. I think that was the condition 
in which we found ourselves when we established this 
Government. We had slaves among us, we could not 
get our Constitution unless we permitted them to 
remain in slavery; we could not secure the good we 
did secure if we grasped for more; and having by 
necessity submitted to that much it does not destroy 
the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let 
that charter stand as our standard. 

My friend has said to me that I am a poor hand to 
quote Scripture. I will try it again, however. It is 
said in one of the admonitions of our Lord; "As your 
Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect." The 
Savior, I suppose, did not expect that any human 
creature could be perfect as the Father in Heaven; but 
He said; "As your Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye 
also perfect." He set that up as a standard, and he 
who did most toward reaching that standard, attained 
the highest degree of moral perfection. So I say in 
relation to the principle that all men are created equal, 
let it be as nearly reached as we can. If we cannot 
give freedom to every creature, let us do nothing that 



LINCOLN AS A LAWYER. 6 1 

will impose slavery upon any other creature. Let us 
then turn this Government back into the channel in 
which the framers of the Constitution originally placed 
it. Let us stand firmly by each other. If we do not do 
so we are tending in the contrary direction that our 
friend Judge Douglas proposes — not intentionally — as 
working in the traces tends to make this one universal 
slave nation. He is one that runs in that direction, 
and as such I resist him. 

My friends, I have detained you about as long as I 
desired to do, and I have only to say, let us discard all 
this quibbling about this man and the other man, this 
race and that race and the other race being inferior, 
and therefore they must be placed in an inferior posi- 
tion. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one 
people throughout this land, until we shall once more 
stand up declaring that all men are created equal. 



LINCOLN AS A LAWYER. 

As he entered the trial, where most lawyers would 
object he would say he "reckoned" it would be fair to 
let this in, or that, and sometimes, when his adversary 
could not quite prove what Lincoln knew to be the 
truth, he "reckoned" it would be fair to admit the 
truth to be so-and-so. When he did object to the 
court, and when he heard his objections answered, he 
would often say, "Well, I reckon I must be wrong." 



62 LINCOLN AS A LAWYER. 

Now, about the time he had practiced this three-fourths 
through the case, if his adversary didn't understand 
him, he would wake up in a few minutes learning that 
he had feared the Greeks too late, and find himself 
beaten. He was wise as a serpent in the trial of a 
cause, but I have had too many scares from his blows 
to certify that he was harmless as a dove. When the 
whole thing was unraveled, the adversary would begin 
to see that what he was so blandly giving away was 
simply what he couldn't get and keep. By giving away 
six points and carrying the seventh, he carried his 
case, and the whole case hanging on the seventh, he 
traded away everything which would give him the least 
aid in carrying that. Any man who took Lincoln for 
a simple-minded man would very soon wake up with 
his back in a ditch. Leonard Swett. 

From "Hemdon's Life of Lincoln." 



In all the elements that constituted a lawyer he had 
few equals. He was great at nisi pr ins * and before an 
appellate tribunal. He seized the strong points of a 
case and presented them with clearness and great com- 
pactness. His mind was logical and direct, and he did 
not indulge in extraneous discussion. Generalities and 
platitudes had no charm for him. An unfailing vein 
of humor never deserted him, and he was able to clakn 

*In general: nisi prius courts are tribunals to determine facts, 
courts where cases are tried in the first instance ; appellate courts, 
tribunals of appeal, courts to determine questions of law which 
arise in the trial in nisi prius courts. 



LINCOLN AS A LAWYER. 63 

the attention of court and jury when the cause was 
most uninteresting by the appropriateness of his 
anecdotes. His power of comparison was large, and 
he rarely failed in a legal discussion to use that mode 
of reasoning. The framework of his mental and moral 
being was honesty, and a wrong case was poorly 
defended by him. The ability which some eminent 
lawyers possess of explaining away the bad points of a 
case by ingenious sophistry was denied him. In order 
to bring into full activity his great powers it was 
necessary that he should be convinced of the right and 
justice of the matter which he advocated. When so 
convinced, whether the case was great or small, he was 
usually successful. 

Mr. Lincoln had no managing faculty nor organiz- 
ing power; hence a child could conform to the simple 
and technical rules, the means and the modes of get- 
ting at justice, better than he. The law has its own 
rules, and a student could get at them or keep with 
them better than Lincoln. Sometimes he was forced 
to study these if he could not get the rubbish of a case 
removed. But all the way through his lack of method 
and organizing ability was clearly apparent. 

When in a law suit he believed his client was 
oppressed — as in the Wright case — he was hurtful in 
denunciation. When he attacked meanness, fraud, or 
vice, he was powerful, merciless in his castigation. 

From "Hemdort 's Life of Lincoln." Judge David Davis. 



64 LINCOLN" AS A LAWYER. 

The Wright case referred to was a suit brought by 
Lincoln and myself to compel a pension agent to 
refund a portion of a fee which he had withheld from 
the widow of a Revolutionary soldier. The entire 
pension was $400, of which sum the agent had retained 
one-half. The pensioner, an old woman crippled 
and bent with age, came hobbling into the office and 
told her story. It stirred Lincoln up, and he walked 
over to the agent's office and made a demand for a 
return of the money, but without success. Then suit 
was brought. The day before the trial I hunted up 
for Lincoln, at his request, a history of the Revolution- 
ary War. of which he read a good portion. He told 
me to remain during the trial, until I had heard his 
address to the jury. "For," said he, "I am going to 
skin Wright, and get that money back." The only 
witness we introduced was the old lady, who, through 
her tears, told her story. In his speech to the jury, 
Lincoln recounted the causes leading to the outbreak 
of the Revolutionary struggle, and then drew a vivid 
picture of the hardships of Valley Forge, describing 
with minuteness the men, barefooted and with bleed- 
ing feet, creeping over the ice. As he reached that 
point in his speech wherein he narrated the hardened 
action of the defendant in fleecing the old woman of 
her pension his eyes flashed, and throwing aside his 
handkerchief, which he held in his right hand, he fairly 
launched into him. His speech for the next fire or 
ten minutes justified the declaration of Davis, that he 



— -1 







Lincoln as a lawyer. 65 

was "hurtful in denunciation and merciless in castiga- 
tion. " There was no rule of court to restrain him in 
his argument, and I never, either on the stump or on 
other occasions in court, saw him so wrought up. 
Before he closed, he drew an ideal picture of the plain- 
tiff's husband, the deceased soldier, parting with his 
wife at the threshold of their home, and kissing their 
little babe in cradle, as he started for the war. "Time 
rolls by," he said, in conclusion; "The heroes of '76 
have passed away and are encamped on the other shore. 
The soldier has gone to rest, and now, crippled, 
blinded, and broken, his widow comes to you and to 
me, gentlemen of the jury, to right her wrongs. She 
was not always thus. She was once a beautiful young 
woman. Her step was as elastic, her face as fair, and 
her voice as sweet as any that rang in the mountains 
of old Virginia. But now she is poor and defenseless. 
Out here on the prairies of Illinois, many hundreds of 
miles away from the scenes of her childhood, she 
appeals to us, who enjoy the privileges achieved for 
us by the patriots of the Revolution, for our sympa- 
thetic aid and manly protection. All I ask is, shall we 
befriend her?" The speech made the desired impres- 
sion on the jury. Half of them were in tears, while 
the defendant sat in the court room, drawn up and 
writhing under the fire of Lincoln's fierce invective. 
The jury returned a verdict in our favor for every cent 
we demanded. Lincoln was so much interested in the old 
lady that he became her surety for costs, paid her way 



66 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

home, and her hotel bill while she was in Springfield. 
When the judgment was paid we remitted the proceeds 
to her and made no charge for our services. Lincoln's 
notes for the argument were unique: "Xo contract. — 
Not professional services. — Unreasonable charge. — 
Money retained by Deft not given by Pl'ff. — Revo- 
lutionary War. — Describe Valley Forge privations. — 
Ice. — Soldiers' bleeding feet. — Pl'ff's husband. — 
Soldier leaving home for army. — Skin Deft. — Close." 
From "Life of Lincoln" Wm. H. Herxdon. 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

{Delivered in New York, February 27, i860.) 

Mr. President and Fellow Citizens of New- 
York: — The facts with which I shall deal this evening 
are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything 
new in the general use I shall make of them. If there 
shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of present- 
ing the facts, and the inferences and observations fol- 
lowing that presentation. 

In his speech last autumn at Columbus, Ohio, as 
reported in the New York Times, Senator Douglas 
said: 

"Our fathers, when they framed the Government 
under which we live, understood this question just as 
well, and even better, than we do now." 

I fully indorse this, and I adopt it as a text for this 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 67 

discourse. I so adopt it because it furnishes a precise 
and an agreed starting point for the discussion between 
Republicans and that wing of the Democracy headed 
by Senator Douglas. It simply leaves the inquiry, 
"What was the understanding those fathers had of the 
questions mentioned?" 

What is the frame of Government under which we 
live? 

The answer must be, "The Constitution of the 
United States. ' ' That Constitution consists of the orig- 
inal, framed in 1787 (and under which the present 
Government first went into operation), and twelve 
subsequently framed amendments, the first ten of 
which were framed in 1789. 

Who were our fathers that framed the Constitution? 
I suppose the "thirty-nine" who signed the original 
instrument may be fairly called our fathers who framed 
that part of the present Government. It is almost 
exactly true to say they framed it, and it is altogether 
true to say they fairly represented the opinion and 
sentiment of the whole nation at that time. Their 
names, being familiar to nearly all, and accessible to 
quite all, need not now be repeated. 

I take these "thirty-nine," for the present, as being 
"our fathers who framed the Government under which 
we live." 

"What is the question which, according to the text, 
those fathers understood just as well, and even better, 
than we do now? 



68 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

It is this: Does the proper division of local from 
federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, for- 
bid our Federal Government control as to slavery in 
our Federal Territories? 

Upon this, Douglas holds the affirmative, and 
Republicans the negative. This affirmative and denial 
form an issue; and this issue — this question — is pre- 
cisely what the text declares our fathers understood 
better than we. 

Let us now inquire whether the "thirty-nine," or 
any of them, ever acted upon this question ; and if they 
did, how they acted upon it — how they expressed that 
better understanding. 

In 17S4, three years before the Constitution, the 
United States then owning the Northwestern Territory, 
and no other, the Congress of the Confederation had 
before them the question of prohibiting slavery in 
that Territory; and four of the "thirty -nine" who 
afterward framed the Constitution were in that Con- 
s, and voted on that question. Of these, Roger 
Sherman, Thomas Mifflin, and Hugh Williamson voted 
for the prohibition, thus showing that, in their under- 
standing, no line dividing local from federal authority, 
nor anything else, properly forbade the Federal 
Government control as to slavery in federal territory. 
The other of the four, James Mc Henry, voted against 
the prohibition, showing that for some cause he 
thought it improper to vote for it. 

In 1787, still before the Constitution, but while the 



______ 

■ 

I 
: r 

— 

- 

s 

- 
; 



70 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

branches without yeas and nays, which is equivalent to 
a unanimous passage. In this Congress there were 
sixteen of the "thirty-nine" fathers who framed the 
original Constitution. They were John Langdon, 
Nicholas Gilman, Wm. S. Johnson, Roger Sherman, 
Robert Morris, Thos. Fitzsimmons, William Few, 
Abraham Baldwin, Rufus King, William Patterson, 
George Clymer, Richard Bassett, George Read, Pierce 
Butler, Daniel Carrol, James Madison. 

This shows that, in their understanding, no line 
dividing local from federal authority, nor anything in 
the Constitution, properly forbade Congress to prohibit 
slavery in the federal territory; else both their fidelity 
to correct principle, and their oath to support the Con- 
stitution, would have constrained them to oppose the 
prohibition. 

Again, George Washington, another of the "thirty- 
nine," was then President of the United States, and 
as such approved and signed the bill, thus completing 
its validity as a law, and thus showing that, in his 
understanding, no line dividing local from federal 
authority, nor anything in the Constitution, forbade the 
Federal Government control as to slavery in federal 
territory. 

No great while after the adoption of the original 
Constitution, North Carolina ceded to the Federal 
Government the country now constituting the State of 
Tennessee; and a few } T ears later Georgia ceded that 
which now constitutes the States of Mississippi and 



1 
-- - 

- 

- - 

— r 

- 

3 - "- 

! 

- 

- 

■ 



72 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

New Orleans, lying within that part, was an old and 
comparatively large city. There were other consider- 
able towns and settlements, and slavery was extensively 
and thoroughly intermingled with the people. Con- 
gress did not, in the Territorial Act, prohibit slavery; 
but they did interfere with it — take control of it — in a 
more marked and extensive way than they did in the 
case of Mississippi. The substance of the provision 
therein made in relation to slaves was : 

(i) That no slave should be imported into the terri- 
tory from foreign parts. 

(2) That no slave should be carried into it who had 
been imported into the United States since the first 
day of May, 1798. 

(3) That no slave should be carried into it, except by 
the owner, and for his own use as a settler; the 
penalty in all the cases being a fine upon the violator 
of the law, and freedom to the slave. 

This act also was passed without yeas and nays. In 
the Congress which passed it there were two of the 
"thirty-nine." They were Abraham Baldwin and 
Jonathan Dayton. As stated in the case of Missis- 
sippi, it is probable they both voted for it. They 
would not have allowed it to pass without recording 
their opposition to it if, in their understanding, it vio- 
lated either the line proper dividing local from federal 
authority, or any provision of the Constitution. 

In 1819-20 came and passed the Missouri question. 
Many votes were taken, by yeas and nays, in both 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 73 

branches of Congress, upon the various phases of the 
general question. Two of the "thirty-nine" — Rufus 
King and Charles Pinckney— were members of that 
Cong'ress. Mr. King steadily voted for slavery prohi- 
bition and against all compromises, while Mr. Pinck- 
ney as steadily voted against slavery prohibition and 
against all compromises. By this, Mr. King showed 
that, in his understanding, no line dividing local 
from federal authority, nor anything in the Con- 
stitution, was violated by Congress prohibiting slavery 
in federal territory; while Mr. Pinckney, by his 
votes, showed that, in his understanding, there was 
some sufficient reason for opposing such prohibition in 
that case. 

The cases I have mentioned are the only acts of the 
"thirty-nine," or of any of them, upon the direct 
issue, which I have been able to discover. 

To enumerate the persons who thus acted as being 
four in 1784, two in 1787, seventeen in 1789, three in 
1798, two in 1804, and two in 1819-20, there would be 
thirty of them. But this would be counting John 
Langdon, Roger Sherman, William Few, Rufus King, 
and George Read each twice, and Abraham Baldwin 
three times. The true number of those of the "thirty- 
nine" whom I have shown to have acted upon the 
question which, by the text, they understood better 
than we, is twenty-three, leaving sixteen not shown to 
have acted upon it in any way. 

Here, then, we have twenty-three out of our "thirty- 



74 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

nine" fathers who framed the Government under which 
we live, who have, upon their official responsibility and 
their corporal oaths, acted upon the very question 
which the text affirms they "understood just as well, 
and even better, than we do now"; and twenty-one of 
them — a clear majority of the whole "thirty-nine" — so 
acting upon it as to make them guilty of gross political 
impropriety and willful perjury if, in their understand- 
ing, any proper division between local and federal 
authority, or anything in the Constitution they had 
made themselves, and sworn to support, forbade the 
Federal Government control as to slavery in the fed- 
eral territories. Thus the twenty-one acted; and, as 
actions speak louder than words, so actions under such 
responsibility speak still louder. 

Two of the twenty-three voted against Congressional 
prohibition of slavery in the Federal Territories, in the 
instances in which they acted upon the question. But 
for what reasons they so voted is not known. They 
may have done so because they thought a proper 
division of local from federal authority, or some pro- 
vision or principle of the Constitution, stood in the 
way; or they may, without any such question, have 
voted against the prohibition on what appeared to 
them to be sufficient grounds of expediency. No one 
who has sworn to support the Constitution can con- 
scientiously vote for what he understands to be an 
unconstitutional measure, however expedient he may 
think it; but one may and ought to vote against a 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 75 

measure which he deems constitutional if, at the same 
time, he deems it inexpedient. It, therefore, would 
be unsafe to set down even the two who voted against 
the prohibition as having done so because, in their 
understanding, any proper division of local from fed- 
eral authority, or anything in the Constitution, for- 
bade the Federal Government control as to slavery in 
federal territory. 

The remaining sixteen of the "thirty-nine," so far as 
I have discovered, have left no record of their under- 
standing upon the direct question of federal control 
of slavery in the Federal Territories. But there is 
much reason to believe that their understanding upon 
that question would not have appeared different from 
that of their twenty-three compeers, had it been mani- 
fested at all. 

For the purpose of adhering rigidly to the text, I 
have purposely omitted whatever understanding may 
have been manifested b) 7 any person, however dis- 
tinguished, other than the "thirty-nine" fathers who 
framed the original Constitution; and, for the same 
reason, I have also omitted whatever understanding 
may have been manifested by any of the "thirty-nine" 
even on any other phase of the general question of 
slavery. If we should look into their acts and declara- 
tions on those other phases, as the foreign slave-trade, 
and the morality and policy of slavery generally, it 
would appear to us that on the direct question of fed- 
eral control of slavery in Federal Territories, the 



76 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

sixteen, if they had acted at all, would probably have 
acted just as the twenty- three did. Among- that six- 
teen were several of the most noted anti-slavery men 
of those times, — as Dr. Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, 
and Gouverneur Morris, — while there was not one now 
known to have been otherwise, unless it may be John 
Rutledge, of South Carolina. 

The sum of the whole is, that of our "thirty-nine" 
fathers who framed the original Constitution, twenty- 
one — a clear majority of the whole — certainly under- 
stood that no proper division of local from federal 
authority, nor any part of the Constitution, forbade the 
Federal Government to control slavery in the Federal 
Territories; while all the rest probably had the same 
understanding. Such, unquestionably, was the under- 
standing of our fathers who framed the original Con- 
stitution ; and the text affirms that they understood the 
question "better than we." 

But, so far, I have been considering the understand- 
ing of the question manifested by the framers of the 
original Constitution. In and by the original instru- 
ment, a mode was provided for amending it; and, as I 
have already stated, the present frame of "the Govern- 
ment under which we live" consists of that original, 
and twelve amendatory articles framed and adopted 
since. Those who now insist that federal control of 
slavery in federal territories violates the Constitution, 
point us to the provisions which they suppose it thus 
violates; and, as I understand, they all fix upon pro- 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 77 

visions in these amendatory articles, and not in the 
original instrument. The Supreme Court, in the Dred 
Scott case, plant themselves upon the fifth amendment, 
which provides that no person shall be deprived of 
life, liberty, or property without due process of law; 
while Senator Douglas and his peculiar adherents 
plant themselves upon the tenth amendment, provid- 
ing that "the powers not delegated to the United 
States by the Constitution are reserved to the States 
respectively, or to the people." 

Now, it so happens that these amendments were 
framed by the first Congress which sat under the Con- 
stitution — the identical Congress which passed the act, 
already mentioned, enforcing the prohibition of slavery 
in the Northwestern Territory. Not only was it the 
same Congress, but they were the identical, same indi- 
vidual men who, at the same session, and at the same 
time within the session, had under consideration, and 
in progress toward maturity, these Constitutional 
amendments, and this act prohibiting slavery in all the 
territory the nation then owned. The Constitutional 
amendments were introduced before, and passed after, 
the act enforcing the Ordinance of '87; so that during 
the whole pendency of the act to enforce the Ordinance, 
the Constitutional amendments were also pending. 

That Congress, consisting in all of seventy-six mem- 
bers, including sixteen of the framers of the original 
Constitution, as before stated, were pre-eminently our 
fathers who framed that part of the Government under 



78 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

which we live, which is now claimed as forbidding the 
Federal Government to control slavery in the Federal 
Territories. 

Is it not a little presumptuous in any one at this day 
to affirm that the two things which that Congress 
deliberately framed, and carried to maturity at the 
same time, are absolutely inconsistent with each other? 
And does not such affirmation become impudently 
absurd when coupled with the other affirmation, from 
the same mouth, that those who did the two things 
alleged to be inconsistent, understood whether they 
were really inconsistent better than we — better than he 
who affirms that they are inconsistent? 

It is surely safe to assume that the "thirty-nine" 
framers of the original Constitution, and the seventy- 
six members of the Congress which framed the amend- 
ments thereto, taken together, do certainly include 
those who may be fairly called "our fathers who framed 
the Government under which we live. ' ' And so assum- 
ing, I defy any man to show that any one of them 
ever, in his whole life, declared that, in his understand- 
ing, any proper division of local from federal 
authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the 
Federal Government control as to slavery in the Fed- 
eral Territories. I go a step further. I defy any one 
to show that any living man in the whole world ever 
did, prior to the beginning of the present century (and 
I might almost say prior to the beginning of the last 
half of the present century), declare that, in his under- 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 79 

standing, any proper division of local from federal 
authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the 
Federal Government control as to slavery in the 
Federal Territories. To those who now so declare I 
give not only "our fathers who framed the Government 
under which we live," but with them all other living 
men within the century in which it was framed, 
among whom to search, and they shall not be able to 
find the evidence of a single man agreeing with them. 

Now, and here, let me guard a little against being 
misunderstood. I do not mean to say we are bound 
to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To 
do so would be to discard all the lights of current 
experience, to reject all progress, all improvement. 
What I do say is that if we would supplant the opin- 
ions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should 
do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so 
clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered 
and weighed, cannot stand; and most surely not in a 
case whereof we ourselves declare they understood the 
question better than we. 

If any man at this day sincerely believes that a 
proper division of local from federal authority, or any 
part of the Constitution, forbids the Federal Govern- 
ment control as to slavery in the federal territories, 
he is right to say so, and to enforce his position by all 
truthful evidence and fair argument which he can. 
But he has no right to mislead others, who have less 
access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the 



8o COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

false belief that "our fathers who framed the Govern- 
ment under which we live" were of the same opinion 
— thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful 
evidence and fair argument. If any man at this day 
sincerely believes "our fathers who framed the Govern- 
ment under which we live" used and applied prin- 
ciples, in other cases, which ought to have led them to 
understand that a proper division of local from federal 
authority, or some part of the Constitution, forbids the 
Federal Government control as to slavery in the Fed- 
eral Territories, he is right to say so. But he should, 
at the same time, brave the responsibility of declaring 
that, in his opinion, he understands their principles 
better than they did themselves ; and especially should 
he not shirk that responsibility by asserting that they 
"understood the question just as well, and even better 
than we do now." 

But enough! Let all who believe that "our fathers 
who framed the Government under which we live 
understood this question just as well, and even better, 
than we do now" speak as they spoke, and act as they 
acted upon it. This is all Republicans ask — all 
Republicans desire — in relation to slavery. As those 
fathers marked it, so let it be again marked, as an evil 
not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected 
only because of and so far as its actual presence among 
us makes that toleration and protection a necessity. 
Let all the guaranties those fathers gave it be not 
grudgingly but fully and fairly maintained. For this 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 8l 

Republicans contend, and with this, so far as I know or 
believe, they will be content. 

And now, if they would listen, — as I suppose they 
will not, — I would address a few words to the South- 
ern people. 

I would say to them: You consider yourselves a 
reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the 
general qualities of reason and justice you are not 
inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of 
us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as 
reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. 
You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but 
nothing like it to "Black Republicans." In all your 
contentions with one another, each of you deems an 
unconditional condemnation of "Black Republicanism" 
as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such con- 
demnation of us seems to be an indispensable prereq- 
uisite — license, so to speak — among you to be 
admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now can you 
or not be prevailed upon to pause and to consider 
whether this is quite just to us, or even to your- 
selves? Bring forward your charges and specifica- 
tions, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny 
or justify. 

You say we are sectional. We deny it. That makes 
an issue ; and the burden of proof is upon you. You 
produce your proof; and what is it? Why, that our 
party has no existence in your section — gets no votes 
in your section. The fact is substantially true; but 



82 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

does it prove the issue? If it does, then in case we 
should, without change of principle, begin to get votes 
in your section, we should thereby cease to be sec- 
tional. You cannot escape this conclusion; and yet, 
are you willing to abide by it? If you are, you will 
probably soon find that we have ceased to be sectional, 
for we shall get votes in your section this very year. 
You will then begin to discover, as the truth plainly 
is, that your proof does not touch the issue. The fact 
that we get no votes in your section is a fact of your 
making, and not of ours. And if there be fault in that 
fact, that fault is primarily yours, and remains so until 
you show that we repel you by some wrong principle or 
practice. If we do repel you by any wrong prin- 
ciple or practice, the fault is ours ; but this brings you 
to where you ought to have started — to a discussion of 
the right or wrong of our principle. If our principle, 
put in practice, would wrong your section for the bene- 
fit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle, 
and we with it, are sectional, and are justly opposed 
and denounced as such. Meet us, then, on the ques- 
tion of whether our principle, put in practice, would 
wrong your section ; and so meet it as if it were pos- 
sible that something may be said on our side. Do you 
accept the challenge? No! Then you really believe 
that the principle which our fathers who framed the 
Government under which we live thought so clearly 
right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, 
upon their official oaths, is in fact so clearly wrong as 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 83 

to demand your condemnation without a moment's 
consideration. 

Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warn- 
ing against sectional parties given by Washington in 
his Farewell Address. Less than eight years before 
Washington gave that warning, he had, as President 
of the United States, approved and signed an act of 
Congress enforcing the prohibition of slavery in the 
Northwestern Territory, which act embodied the policy 
of the government upon that subject up to and at the 
very moment he penned that warning; and about one 
year after he penned it he wrote Lafayette that he 
considered that prohibition a wise measure, expressing 
in the same connection his hope that we should some 
time have a confederacy of free States. 

Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism 
has since arisen upon this same subject, is that warn- 
ing a weapon in your hands against us, or in our hands 
against you? Could Washington himself speak, would 
he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who 
sustain his policy, or upon you, who repudiate it? We 
respect that warning of Washington, and we com- 
mend it to you, together with his example pointing to 
the right application of it. 

But you say you are conservative — eminently con- 
servative — while we are revolutionary, destructive, or 
something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it 
not adherence to the old and tried against the new and 
untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old 



84 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

policy on the point in controversy which was adopted 
by our fathers who framed the Government under 
which we live; while you, with one accord, reject, and 
scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon 
substituting something new. True, you disagree 
among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. 
You are divided on new propositions and plans, but 
you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the 
old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for reviv- 
ing the foreign slave-trade ; some for a Congressional 
Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress 
forbidding the Territories to prohibit slavery within 
their limits; some for maintaining slavery in the 
Territories through the Judiciary; some for the "gur- 
reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave 
another, no third man should object," fantastically 
called "Popular Sovereignty"; but never a man among 
you is in favor of federal prohibition of slavery in 
Federal Territories, according to the practice of our 
fathers who framed the Government under which we 
live. Not one of all your various plans can show a 
precedent or an advocate in the century within which 
our Government originated. Consider, then, whether 
your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your 
charge of destructiveness against us, are based on the 
most clear and stable foundations. 

Again, you say we have made the slavery question 
more prominent than it formerly was. We deny it. 
We admit that it is more prominent, but we deny that 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 85 

we made it so. It was not we, but you, who discarded 
the old policy of the fathers. We resisted, and still 
resist, your innovation ; and thence comes the greater 
prominence of the question. Would you have that 
question reduced to its former proportions? Go back 
to that old policy. What has been will be again, under 
the same conditions. If you would have the peace of 
the old times, re-adopt the precepts and policy of the 
old times. 

You charge that we stir up insurrections among your 
slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Har- 
per's Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no 
Republican ; and you have failed to implicate a single 
Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any 
member of our party is guilty in that matter, you 
know it, or you do not know it. If you do know it, you 
are inexcusable for not designating the man and prov- 
ing the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcus- 
able for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the 
assertion after you have tried and failed to make the 
proof. You need not be told that persisting in a charge 
which one does not know to be true is simply malicious 
slander. 

Some of you admit that no Republican designedly 
aided or encouraged the Harper's Ferry affair, but 
still insist that our doctrines and declarations neces- 
sarily lead to such results. We do not believe it. We 
know we hold to no doctrine, and make no declaration, 
which were not held to and made by our fathers who 



86 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

framed the Government under which we live. You 
never deal fairly by us in relation to this affair. When 
it occurred, some important State elections were near 
at hand, and you were in evident glee with the belief 
that, by charging the blame upon us, you could get an 
advantage of us in those elections. The elections 
came, and your expectations were not quite fulfilled. 
Every Republican man knew that, as to himself at 
least, your charge was a slander, and he was not much 
inclined by it to cast his vote in your favor. Repub- 
lican doctrines and declarations are accompanied with 
a continual protest against any interference whatever 
with your slaves, or with you about your slaves 
Surely, this does not encourage them to revolt. True, 
we do, in common with our fathers who framed the 
Government under which we live, declare our belief 
that slavery is wrong; but the slaves do not hear us 
declare even this. For anything we say or do, the 
slaves would scarcely know there is a Republican 
party. I believe they would not, in fact, generally 
know it but for your misrepresentations of us in their 
hearing. In your political contest among yourselves, 
each faction charges the other with sympathy with 
Black Republicanism; and then, to give point to 
the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply 
be insurrection, blood, and thunder among the 
slaves. 

Slave insurrections are no more common now than 
they were before the Republican party was organ 



■ 



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. . 

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...... 



88 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

to the secret ; and } T et one of them, in his anxiety to 
save a friend, betrayed the plot to that friend, and, by 
consequence, averted the calamity. Occasional poison- 
ings from the kitchen, and open or stealthy assassina- 
tions in the field, and local revolts extending to a score 
or so, will continue to occur as the natural results of 
slavery; but no general insurrection of slaves, as I 
think, can happen in this country for a long time. 
"Whoever much fears, or much hopes, for such an 
event, will be alike disappointed. 

In the language of Mr. Jefferson, uttered many 
years ago, "It is still in our power to direct the process 
of emancipation and deportation peaceably, and in such 
slow degrees as that the evil will wear off insensibly ; 
and their places be, pari passu, filled up by free white 
laborers. If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, 
human nature must shudder at the prospect held up. ' ' 

Mr. Jefferson did not mean to say, nor do I, that the 
power of emancipation is in the Federal Government. 
He spoke of Virginia ; and, as to the power of emanci- 
n pation, I speak of the slaveholding States only. 

The Federal Government, however, as we insist, has 
the power of restraining the extension of the institution 
— the power to insure that a slave insurrection shall 
never occur on any American soil which is now free 
from slavery. 

John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave 
insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to 
get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves 



COOPEP SPEECH. 89 

refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that 
the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough 
it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, 
corresponds with the many attempts, related in his- 
tory, at the assassination of kings and emper 
enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till 
he fancies himself commissioned by heaven to liberate 
them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little 
else than in his own execution. Orsini's* attempt on 
Louis Napoleon, and John Brown's attempt at Harper's 
Ferry, were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. 
The eagerness to cast blame on old England in the one 
case, and on New England in the other, does not dis- 
prove the sameness of the two things. 

And how much would it avail you, if you could, by 
the use of John Brown, Helper's book,f and the like, 
break up the Republican organization? Human action 
can be modified to some extent, but human nature 
cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feel- 
ing against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a 
million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that 
judgment and feeling — that sentiment — by breaking 
up the political organization which rallies around it. 



*Orsini, Felice. An Italian patriot and revolutionist. He, 
with others, attempted to assassinate Napoleon III. January 14, 
1858. He was executed March 13, 1858. 

+ Helper's book. "The Impending Crisis of the South : How to 
Meet It," was written in 1857 by a poor white of North Carolina 
and first attracted attention from the Republicans in 1S59. "It 
was an arraignment of slavery from the standpoint of the poor 
white, and in his interest." 



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Federal Territories android them there as property. 
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right has any ... stence in the ZonsA tnf n 1 f 

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92 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

such right is affirmed in the instrument by implication, 
it would be open to others to show that neither the 
word "slave" nor "slavery" is to be found in the Con- 
stitution, nor the word "property" even, in any con- 
nection with language alluding to the things slave, or 
slavery ; and that wherever in that instrument the slave 
is alluded to, he is called a "person" ; and wherever his 
master's legal right in relation to him is alluded to, it 
is spoken of as "service or labor which may be due," 
as a "debt" payable in service or labor. Also it would 
be open to show, by contemporaneous history, that 
this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of 
speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude 
from the Constitution the idea that there could be 
property in man. 

To show all this is easy and certain. 

When this obvious mistake of the Judges shall be 
brought to their notice, is it not reasonable to expect 
that they will withdraw the mistaken statement, and 
reconsider the conclusion based upon it? 

And then it is to be remembered that "our fathers 
who framed the Government under which we live" — 
the men who made the Constitution — decided this same 
Constitutional question in our favor long ago; decided 
it without division among themselves when making the 
decision ; without division among themselves about the 
meaning of it after it was made, and, so far as any evi- 
dence is left, without basing it upon any mistaken 
statement of facts. 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 93 

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel 
yourselves justified to break up this Government unless 
such a court decision as yours is shall be at once sub- 
mitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political 
action? But you will not abide the election of a Repub- 
lican President! In that supposed event, you say, you 
will destroy the Union ; and then, you say, the great 
crime of having destro5^ed it will be upon us ! That is 
cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and 
mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I 
shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!" 

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me — my 
money — was my own ; and I had a clear right to keep 
it ; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own ; 
and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, 
and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort 
my vote, can scarcety be distinguished in principle. 

A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly 
desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall 
be at peace, and in harmony one with another. Let 
us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though 
much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and 
ill-temper. Even though the southern people will not 
so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their 
demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of 
our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say 
and do, and by the subject and nature of their con- 
troversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will 
satisfy them. 



94 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be uncon- 
ditionally surrendered to them? We know they will 
not. In all their present complaints against us, the 
Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and 
insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them 
if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions 
and insurrections? We know it will not. We so 
know, because we know we never had anything to do 
with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total 
abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and 
the denunciation. 

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply 
this : We must not only let them alone, but we must 
somehow convince them that we do let them alone. 
This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We 
have been so trying to convince them from the very 
beginning of our organization, but with no success. 
In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly 
protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has 
had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing 
to convince them is the fact that they have never 
detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb 
them. 

These natural and apparently adequate means all 
failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: 
Cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling 
it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in 
acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated 
— we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Sen- 



COOPER UNION SPEECH. 95 

ator Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and 
enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is 
wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, 
or in private. We must arrest and return their fugi- 
tive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down 
our Free-State Constitutions. The whole atmosphere 
must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to 
slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their 
troubles proceed from us. 

I am quite aware they do not state their case pre- 
cisely in this way. Most of them would probably say 
to us, "Let us alone; do nothing to us, and say what 
you please about slavery." But we do let them alone, 
— have never disturbed them, — so that, after all, it is 
what we say which dissatisfies them. They will con- 
tinue to accuse us of doing until we cease saying. 

I am also aware they have not as yet in terms 
demanded the overthrow of our Free-State Constitu- 
tions. Yet those Constitutions declare the wrong of 
slavery with more solemn emphasis than do all other 
sayings against it; and when all these other sayings 
shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these Con- 
stitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to 
resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary that 
they do not demand the whole of this just now. 
Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, 
they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this con- 
summation. Holding, as they do, that slavery is 
morally right and socially elevating, they cannot cease 



96 COOPER UNION SPEECH. 

to demand a full national recognition of it as a legal 
right and a social blessing. 

Nor can we justifiably withhold this on any ground 
save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery 
is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against 
it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and 
swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to 
its nationality — its universality; if it is wrong, they 
cannot justly insist upon its extension — its enlarge- 
ment. All they ask we could readily grant, if we 
thought slavery right ; all we ask they could as readily 
grant if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it 
right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact 
upon which depends the whole controversy. Think- 
ing it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desir- 
ing its full recognition as being right ; but thinking it 
wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast 
our votes with their view, and against our own? In 
view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, 
can we do this? 

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to 
let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the 
necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation ; 
but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to 
spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us 
here in these Free States? 

If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand 
by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be 
diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances 



EXTRACT FROM HARTFORD SPEECH. 97 

wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored 
— contrivances such as groping for some middle ground 
between the right and the wrong ; vain as the search 
for a man who should be neither a living man nor a 
dead man; such as a policy of "don't care" on a ques- 
tion about which all true men do care ; such as Uni< >n 
appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Dis- 
unionists, reversing the Divine rule, and calling, not 
the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as 
invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay 
what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. 
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false 
accusations against us, nor frightened from it by 
menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of 
dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right 
makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to 
do our duty as we understand it. 



EXTRACT FROM HARTFORD SPEECH. 

{Delivered March j, i860.) 

If the Republicans, who think slavery is wrong, get 
possession of the General Government, we may not 
root out the evil at once, but may at least prevent its 
extension. If I find a venomous snake lying on the 
open prairie, I seize the first stick and kill him at once ; 
but if that snake is in bed with my children, I must be 
more cautious; — I shall, in striking the snake, also 



98 SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF LINCOLN. 

strike the children, or arouse the snake to bite the 
children. Slavery is the venomous snake in bed with 
the children. But if the question is whether to kill it 
on the prairie or put it in bed with other children, I 
am inclined to think we'd kill it. 

Another illustration : When for the first time I met 
Mr. Clay, the other day in the cars, in front of us sat 
an old gentleman with an enormous wen upon his 
neck. Everybody would say the wen was a great evil, 
and would cause the man's death after a while; but 
you couldn't cut it out, for he'd bleed to death in a 
minute. But would you ingraft the seeds of that wen 
on the necks of sound and healthy men? He must 
endure and be patient, hoping for possible relief. The 
wen represents slavery on the neck of this country. 
This only applies to those who think slavery is wrong. 
Those who think it right would consider the snake a 
jewel and the wen an ornament. 



SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF LINCOLN. 

Mr. Lincoln was so unlike all the men I had ever 
known before or seen or known since that there is no 
one to whom I can compare him. In all his habits of 
eating, sleeping, reading, conversation, and study he 
was, if I may so express it, regularly irregular ; that is, 
he had no stated time for eating, no fixed time for 
going to bed, none for getting up. No course of read- 



SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF LINCOLN. 99 

ing was chalked out. He read law, history, philos- 
ophy, or poetry; Burns, Byron, Milton, or Shakespeare 
and the newspapers, retaining them all about as well 
as an ordinary man would any one of them who made 
only one at a time his study. 

I once remarked to him that his mind was a wonder 
to me; that impressions were easily made upon it and 
never effaced. "No," said he, "you are mistaken; I 
am slow to learn, and slow to forget that which I have 
learned. My mind is like a piece of steel — very hard 
to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible after 
you get it there to rub it out. ' ' I give this as his own 
illustration of the character of his mental faculties; it 
is as good as any I have seen from any one. 

The beauty of his character was its entire simplicity. 
He had no affectation in anything. True to nature, 
true to himself, he was true to everybody and every- 
thing around him. When he was ignorant on any 
subject, no matter how simple it might make him 
appear, he was always willing to acknowledge it. His 
whole aim in life was to be true to himself, and, being 
true to himself, he could be false to no one. 

He had no vices, even as a young man. Intense 
thought with him was the rule, and not, as with most 
of us, the exception. He often said that he could 
think better after breakfast, and better walking than 
sitting, lying, or standing. His world-wide reputation 
for telling anecdotes and telling them so well was, in 
my judgment, necessary to his very existence. Most 



IOO FAREWELL SPEECH. 

men who have been great students, such as he was, in 
their hours of idleness have taken to the bottle, to 
cards, or dice. He had no fondness for any of these. 
Hence he sought relaxation in anecdotes. So far as I 
now remember of his study for composition, it was to 
make short sentences and a compact style. Illustrative 
of this it might be well to state that he was a great 
admirer of the style of John C. Calhoun. I remember 
reading to him one of Mr. Calhoun's speeches in 
reply to Mr. Clay in the Senate, in which Mr. Clay had 
quoted precedent. Mr. Calhoun replied (I quote from 
memory) that "to legislate upon precedent is but to 
make the error of yesterday the law of to-day." Lin- 
coln thought that was a great truth and grandly 
uttered. 

Unlike all other men, there was entire harmony 
between his public and private life. He must believe 
he was right, and that he had truth and justice with 
him, or he was a weak man; but no man could be 

stronger if he thought he was right. 

Joshua F. Speed. 
From "Herndon's Life of Lincoln" 



FAREWELL SPEECH. 

{Delivered at Springfield, III., February //, 1S61.) 

My Friends: — Xo one, not in my position, can 
appreciate the sadness I feel at this parting. To this 
people I owe all that I am. Here I have lived more 



EXTRACT FROM SPEECH AT PITTSBURG. 10 1 

than a quarter of a century; here my children were 
born, and here one of them lies buried. I know not 
how soon I shall see you again. A duty devolves upon 
me which is, perhaps, greater than that which has 
devolved upon any other man since the days of Wash- 
ington. He never could have succeeded except for the 
aid of Divine Providence, upon which he at all times 
relied. I feel that I cannot succeed without the same 
Divine aid which sustained him; and in the same 
Almighty being I place my reliance for support, and I 
hope you, my friends, will all pray that I ma} 7- receive 
that Divine assistance, without which I cannot succeed, 
but with which success is certain. Again, I bid you 
all an affectionate farewell. 



EXTRACT FROM SPEECH AT PITTSBURG. 

{Delivered on his -way to JVashiiigton, Febricary, 1S61.) 
In every short address I have made to the people, 
and in every crowd through which I have passed of 
late, some allusion has been made to the present dis- 
tracted condition of the country. It is naturally 
expected that I should say something upon this sub- 
ject; but to touch upon it at all would involve an 
elaborate discussion of a great many questions and 
circumstances, would require more time than I can at 
present command, and would, perhaps, unnecessarily 
commit me upon matters which have not yet fully 
developed themselves. 



102 EXTRACT FROM SPEECH AT PITTSBURG. 

The condition of the country, fellow-citizens, is an 
extraordinary one, and fills the mind of every patriot 
with anxiety. My intention is to give this subject all 
the consideration which I possibly can before I speak 
fully and definitely in regard to it, so that when I do 
speak I may be as nearly right as possible. And when 
I do speak, fellow-citizens, I hope to say nothing in 
opposition to the spirit of the Constitution, contrary to 
the integrity of the Union, or which will in any way 
prove inimical to the liberties of the people, or to the 
peace of the whole country. And furthermore, when 
the time arrives for me to speak on this great subject, 
I hope to say nothing which will disappoint the reason- 
able expectations of any man, or disappoint the people 
generally throughout the country, especially if their 
expectations have been based upon anything which I 
may have heretofore said. 

Notwithstanding the troubles across the river [the 
speaker, smiling, pointed southwardly to the Mononga- 
hela River], there is really no crisis springing from 
anything in the Government itself. In plain words, 
there is really no crisis except an artificial one. What 
is there now to warrant the condition of affairs pre- 
sented by our friends "over the river"? Take even 
their own view of the questions involved, and there is 
nothing to justify the course which they are pursuing. 
I repeat it, then, there is no crisis, except such a one as 
may be gotten up at any time by turbulent men aided 
by designing politicians. My advice, then, under such 



SPEECH AT PHILADELPHIA. 103 

circumstances, is to keep cool. If the great American 
people will only keep their temper on both sides of the 
line, the trouble will come to an end, and the question 
which now distracts the country will be settled just as 
surely as all other difficulties of like character which 
have originated in this Government have been adjusted. 
Let the people on both sides keep their self-possession, 
and just as other clouds have cleared away in due 
time, so will this, and this great nation shall continue 
to prosper as heretofore. 



SPEECH AT PHILADELPHIA. 

(February 21, 1861.) 

I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself 
standing here, in this place, where were collected the 
wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from 
which sprang the institutions under which we live. 
You have kindly suggested to me that in my hands is 
the task of restoring peace to the present distracted 
condition of the country. I can say in return, sir, 
that all the political sentiments I entertain have been 
drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from 
the sentiments which originated and were given to the 
world from this hall. I have never had a feeling 
politically that did not spring from the sentiments 
embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I have 
often pondered over the dangers which were incurred 



104 SPEECH AT PHILADELPHIA. 

by the men who assembled here, and framed and 
adopted that Declaration of Independence. I have 
pondered over the toils that were endured by the 
officers and soldiers of the army who achieved that 
independence. I have often inquired of myself what 
great principle or idea it was that kept this Con- 
federacy so long together. It was not the mere matter 
of the separation of the colonies from the mother-land, 
but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence 
which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this 
country, but, I hope, to the world for all future time. 
It was that which gave promise that in due time the 
weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. 
This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of 
Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be 
saved upon this basis? If it can, I will consider 
myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can 
help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that prin- 
ciple, it will be truly awful. But if this country can- 
not be saved without giving up that principle, I was 
about to say I would rather be assassinated on this 
spot than surrender it. Now, in my view of the 
present aspect of affairs, there need be no bloodshed 
or war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in 
favor of such a course, and I may say, in advance, 
that there will be no bloodshed unless it be forced 
upon the Government, and then it will be compelled 
to act in self-defense. 

My friends, this is wholly an unexpected speech, and 



THE SITUATION IN l86l. 105 

I did not expect to be called upon to say a word when 
I came here. I supposed it was merely to do some- 
thing towards raising the flag. I may, therefore, have 
said something indiscreet. I have said nothing but 
what I am willing to live by, and, if it be the pleasure 
of Almighty God, to die by. 



THE SITUATION IN 1861. 

The situation which confronted the new President 
was appalling: the larger part of the South in open 
rebellion, the rest of the slaveholding States wavering, 
preparing to follow; the revolt guided by determined, 
daring, and skillful leaders; the Southern people, 
apparently full of enthusiasm and military spirit, rush- 
ing to arms, some of the forts and arsenals already in 
their possession; the Government of the Union, before 
the accession of the new President, in the hands of 
men some of whom actively sympathized with the 
revolt, while others were hampered by their traditional 
doctrines in dealing with it, and really gave it aid and 
comfort by their irresolute attitude; all the depart- 
ments full of "Southern sympathizers" and honey- 
combed with disloyalty; the treasury empty, and the 
public credit at the lowest ebb; the arsenals ill sup- 
plied with arms, if not emptied by treacherous 
practices; the regular army of insignificant strength, 
dispersed over an immense surface, and deprived of 
some of its best officers by defection ; the navy small 



106 THE SITUATION IN* l86l. 

and antiquated. But that was not all. The threat of 
disunion had so often been resorted to by the slave 
power in years gone by that most Northern people had 
ceased to believe in its seriousness. But when dis- 
union actually appeared as a stern reality, something 
like a chill swept through the whole Northern country. 
A cry for union and peace at any price rose on all sides. 
Democratic partisanship reiterated this cry with 
vociferous vehemence, and even many Republicans 
grew afraid of the victory they had just achieved at the 
ballot-box, and spoke of compromise. The country 
fairly resounded with the noise of "anti-coercion meet- 
ings. " Expressions of firm resolution from determined 
anti-slavery men were indeed not wanting, but they 
were for awhile almost drowned by a bewildering con- 
fusion of discordant voices. Even this was not all. 
Potent influences in Europe, with an ill-concealed 
desire for the permanent disruption of the American 
Union, eagerly espoused the cause of the Southern 
seceders, and the two principal maritime powers of the 
Old World seemed only to be waiting for a favorable 
opportunity to lend them a helping hand. 

This was the state of things to be mastered by 
"Honest Abe Lincoln" when he took his seat in the 
Presidential chair, — "Honest Abe Lincoln," who was 
so good-natured that he could not say "no"; the great- 
est achievement in whose life had been a debate on the 
slavery question ; who had never been in any position 
of power ; who was without the slightest experience of 



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Io8 THE SITUATION" IX lS6l. 

Government; that this war would have to be carried 
on, not by means of a ready-made machinery, ruled by 
an undisputed, absolute will, but by means to be fur- 
nished by the voluntary action of the people: — armies 
to be formed by voluntary enlistment ; large sums of 
money to be raised by the people, through their repre- 
sentatives, voluntarily taxing themselves; trusts of 
extraordinary power to be voluntarily granted; and 
war measures, not seldom restricting the rights and 
liberties to which the citizen was accustomed, to be 
voluntarily accepted and submitted to by the people, 
or at least a large majority of them; — and that this 
would have to be kept up not merely during a sh : rt 
period of enthusiastic excitement, but possibly through 
weary years of alternating success and disaster, hope 
and despondency. He knew that in order to steer this 
Government by public opinion successfully through all 
the confusion created by the prejudices and doubts and 
differences of sentimer.: .':~:ro.cting the popular mind, 
and so to propitiate, inspire, mould, organize, unite, 
and guide the popular will that it might give forth all 
the means required for the performance of his great 
task, he would have to take into account all the influ- 
ences strongly affecting the current of popular thought 
and feeling, and to direct while appearing to obey. 

This was the kind of leadership he intuitively con- 
ceived to be needed when a free people were to be led 
forward en masse to overcome a great common danger 
under circumstances of appalling difficulty, — the 



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IIO FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

tion of the United States to be taken by the President 
"before he enters on the execution of his office." 

I do not consider it necessary at present for me to 
discuss those matters of administration about which 
there is no special anxiety or excitement. Apprehen- 
sion seems to exist among the people of the Southern 
States that by the accession of a Republican adminis- 
tration their property and their peace and personal 
security are to be endangered. There has never been 
any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, 
the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the 
while existed and been open to their inspection. It is 
found in nearly all the published speeches of him who 
now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those 
speeches when I declare that "I have no purpose, 
directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution 
of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I 
have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination 
to do so." Those who nominated and elected me did 
so with the full knowledge that I had made this and 
many similar declarations, and had never recanted 
them. And, more than this, they placed in the plat- 
form for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves 
and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which 
I now read : 

Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the 
States, and especially the right of each State to order and control 
its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment ex- 
clusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the per- 
fection and endurance of our political fabric depend, and we 



FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. Ill 

denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any 
State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the 
gravest of crimes. 

I now reiterate these sentiments ; and, in doing so, I 
only press upon the public attention the most con- 
clusive evidence of which the case is susceptible, that 
the property, peace, and security of no section are to 
be in anywise endangered by the now incoming admin- 
istration. 

I add, too, that all the protection which, consistently 
with the Constitution and the laws, can be given, will 
be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully 
demanded, for whatever cause, as cheerfully to one 
section as to another. 

There is much controversy about the delivering up 

of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now 

read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any 

other of its provisions : 

No person held to service or labor in one State under the laws 
thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or 
regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but 
shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service 
or labor may be due. 

It is scarcely questioned that this provision was 
intended by those who made it for the reclaiming of 
what we call fugitive slaves; and the intention of the 
lawgiver is the law. All members of Congress swear 
their support to the whole Constitution — to this pro- 
vision as much as to any other. To the proposition, 
then, that slaves, whose cases come within the terms of 
this clause, "shall be delivered up" their oaths arc 



112 FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

unanimous. Now, if they would make the effort in 
good temper, could they not, with nearly equal 
unanimity, frame and pass a law by means of which to 
keep good that unanimous oath? 

There is some difference of opinion whether this 
clause should be enforced by National or by State 
authority; but surely that difference is not a very 
material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can 
be of but little consequence to him, or to others, by 
which authority it is done. And should any one, in 
any case, be content that this oath shall go unkept, on 
a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall 
be kept? 

Again, in any law upon this subject, ought not all 
the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and 
humane jurisprudence to be introduced so that a free 
man be not, in any case, surrendered as a slave? And 
might it not be well at the same time to provide by 
law for the enforcement of that clause in the Constitu- 
tion which guarantees that "the citizens of each State 
shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of 
citizens in the several States?" 

I take the official oath to-day with no mental reser- 
vations and with no purpose to construe the Constitu- 
tion or laws by any hypercritical rules. And while I 
do not choose now to specify particular acts of Congress 
as proper to be enforced, I do suggest that it will be 
much safer for all, both in official and private stations, \ 
to conform to and abide by all those acts which stand 



FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. I 13 

[unrepealed, than to violate any of them, t rusting to find 
impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional. 

It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of 
a President under our National Constitution. During 
that period fifteen different and very distinguished citi- 
zens have, in succession, administered the executive 
branch of the Government. They have conducted it 
through many perils, and generally with great success. 
Yet, with all this scope of precedent, I now enter upon 
the same task for the brief constitutional term of four 
years, under great and peculiar difficulties. 

A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only 
menaced, is now formidably attempted. I hold that, 
in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitu- 
tion, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity 
is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of 
all national governments. It is safe to assert that no 
government proper ever had a provision in its organic 
law for its own termination. Continue to execute all 
the express provisions of our National Constitution, 
and the Union will endure forever — it being impossible 
to destroy it except by some action not provided for in 
the instrument itself. 

Again, if the United States be not a government 
proper, but an association of States in the nature of a 
contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably 
unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One 
party to a contract may violate it — break it, so to speak, 
but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it? 



114 FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

Descending from these general principles, we find the 
proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is 
perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself. 

The Union is much older than the Constitution. It 
was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 
1774. It was matured and continued by the Declara- 
tion of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, 
and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly 
plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by 
the Articles of the Confederation, in 1778. And, 
finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordain- 
ing and establishing the Constitution was "to form a 
more perfect Union." But if the destruction of the 
Union by one, or by a part only, of the States be law- 
fully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the 
Constitution, having lost the vital element of per- 
petuity. 

It follows from these views that no State, upon its 
own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union; 
that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally 
void; and that acts of violence, within any State or 
States, against the authority of the United States, are 
insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circum- 
stances. 

I therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution 
and the laws, the Union is unbroken ; and to the extent 
of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself 
expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union 
shall be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing 



FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. "5 

this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part ; and 
I shall perform it, so far as practicable, unless my 
rightf ul masters, the American people , shall withhold 
the requisition means, or in some authoritative manner 
direct the contr ary. I trust this will not be regarded 
as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the 
Union that it will constitutionally defend and maintain 

itself. 

In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or 
violence ; and there shall be none, unless it is forced 
upon the National authority. The power confided to 
me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the prop- 
erty and places belonging to the Government, and to 
collect the duties and imposts ; but beyond what may 
be necessary for these objects, there will be no 
invasion, no using of force against or among the 
people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States 
in any interior locality shall be so great and so uni- 
versal as to prevent competent resident citizens from 
holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to 
force obnoxious strangers among the people for that 
object. While the strict legal right may exist in the 
Government to enforce the exercise of these offices, 
the attempt to do so would be so irritating, and so 
nearly impracticable withal, that I deem it best to 
forego for the time the uses of such offices. 

The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be fur- 
nished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible, 
the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect 



1X6 FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

security which is most favorable to calm thought and 
reflection. The course here indicated will be followed 
unless current events and experience shall show a 
modification or change to be proper, and in every case 
and exigency my best discretion will be exercised 
according to the circumstances actually existing, and 
with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the 
National troubles, and the restoration of fraternal 
sympathies and affections. 

That there are persons in one section or another who 
seek to destroy the Union at all events, and are glad 
of any pretext to do it, I will neither affirm nor deny ; 
but if there be such, I need address no word to them. 
To those, however, who really love the Union, may I 
not speak? Before entering upon so grave a matter 
as the destruction of our National fabric, with all its 
benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be 
wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you 
hazard so desperate a step while any portion of the ills 
you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while 
the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real 
ones you fly from — will you risk the commission of so 
fearful a mistake? 

All profess to be content in the Union, if all consti- 
tutional rights can be maintained. Is it true, then, 
that any right, plainly written in the Constitution, has 
been denied? I think not. Happily the human mind 
is so constituted that no party can reach to the audacity 
of doing this. Think, if you can, of a single instance 



FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 117 

in which a plainly-written provision of the Constitu- 
tion has ever been denied. If, by the mere force of 
numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any 
clearly- written constitutional right, it might, in a moral 
point of view, justify revolution — it certainly would if 
such right were a vital one. But such is not our case. 
All the vital rights of minorities and of individuals are 
so plainly assured to them by affirmations and nega- 
tions, guaranties and prohibitions, in the Constitution, 
that controversies never arise concerning them. But 
no organic law can ever be framed with a provision 
specifically applicable to every question which may 
occur in practical administration. No foresight can 
anticipate, nor any document of reasonable length 
contain, express provisions for all possible questions. 
Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by National 
or by State authorities? The Constitution does not 
expressly say. May Congress prohibit slavery in the 
Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say. 
Must Congress protect slavery in the Territories? The 
Constitution does not expressly say. 

From questions of this class spring all our constitu- 
tional controversies, and we divide upon them into 
majorities and minorities. If the minority will not 
acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government must 
cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing 
the Government is acquiescence on one side or the 
other. If a minority in such case will secede rather 
than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn 



Il8 FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

will divide and ruin them ; for a minority of their own 
will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to 
be controlled by such minority. For instance, why 
may not any portion of a new Confederacy, a year or 
two hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as por- 
tions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? 
All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being 
educated to the exact temper of doing this. Is there 
such perfect identity of interests among the States to 
compose a new Union as to produce harmony only, and 
prevent renewed secession? Plainly, the central idea 
of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority 
held in restraint by constitutional checks and limita- 
tions, and always changing easily with deliberate 
changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the 
only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it 
does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. 
Unanimity is impossible ; the rule of a minority, as a 
permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so 
that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or 
despotism in some form is all that is left. 

I do not forget the position, assumed by some, that 
constitutional questions are to be decided by the 
Supreme Court; nor do I deny that such decisions 
must be binding, in any case, upon the parties to a 
suit, as to the object of that suit, while they are also 
entitled to a very high respect and consideration in all 
parallel cases by all other departments of the Govern- 
ment. And while it is obviously possible that such 



FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. II9 

decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the 
evil effect following it, being limited to that particular 
case, with the chance that it may be overruled, and 
never become a precedent for other cases, can better 
be borne than could the evils of a different practice. 

/'At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that 
if the policy of the Government, upon vital questions 

I affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed 
by the decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they 
are made in ordinary litigation between parties in per- 
sonal actions, the people will have ceased to be their 
own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned 
their Government into the hands of that eminent 
tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon 
the Court or the Judges. It is a duty from which they 
may not shrink, to decide cases properly brought 
before them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek 
to turn their decisions to political purposes. 

One section of our country believes slavery is right, 
and ought to be extended, while the other believes it 
is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the 
only substantial dispute. The fugitive slave clause of 
the Constitution, and the law for the suppression of 
the foreign slave-trade, are each as well enforced, per- 
haps, as any law can ever be in a community where the 
moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law 
itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry 
legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in 
each. This, I think, cannot be perfectly cured; and 



120 FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

it would be worse in both cases after the separation of 
the sections than before. The foreign slave-trade, now 
imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived 
without restriction in one section; while fugitive 
slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be 
surrendered at all by the other. 

Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We can- 
not remove our respective sections from each other, 
nor build an impassable wall between them. A hus- 
band and wife may be divorced, and go out of the 
presence and beyond the reach of each other; but the 
different parts of our country cannot do this. They 
cannot but remain face to face, and intercourse, either 
amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is 
it possible, then, to make that intercourse more 
advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than 
before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends 
can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully 
enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? 
Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and 
when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on 
either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as 
to terms of intercourse are again upon you. 

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the 
people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow 
weary of the existing government they can exercise 
their constitutional right of amending, or their revolu- 
tionary right to dismember or overthrow it. I cannot 
be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic 



FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 121 

citizens are desirous of having the National Constitu- 
tion amended. While I make no recommendation of 
amendment, I fully recognize the full authority of the 
people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either 
of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself ; and 
I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather 
than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the 
people to act upon it. I will venture to add, that to 
me the Convention mode seems preferable, in that it 
allows amendments to originate with the people them- 
selves, instead of only permitting them to take or 
reject propositions originated by others, not especially 
chosen for the purpose, and which might not be pre- 
cisely such as they would wish either to accept 
or refuse. I understand a proposed amendment to 
the Constitution (which amendment, however, I have 
not seen) has passed Congress, to the effect that the 
Federal Government shall never interfere with the 
domestic institutions of the States, including that of 
persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of 
what I have said, I depart from my purpose, not to 
speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that, 
holding such a provision to now be implied constitu- 
tional law, I have no objection to its being made 
express and irrevocable. 

The Chief Magistrate derives all his authority from 
the people, and they have conferred none upon him to 
fix the terms for the separation of the States. The 
people themselves can do this also if they choose ; but 



122 FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

the Executive, as such, has nothing to do with it. His 
duty is to administer the present government, as it 
came to his hands, and to transmit it, unimpaired by 
him, to his successor.^ Why should there not be a 
patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? 
Is there any better or equal hope in the worlds) In ourV 
present differences is either party without faith of 
being in the right? If the Almighty Ruler of nations, 
with his eternal truth and justice, be on your side of 
the North, or on yours of the South, that truth and 
that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this 
great tribunal of the American people. By the frame 
of the government under which we live, this same 
people have wisely given their public servants but little 
power for mischief; and have, with equal wisdom, 
provided for the return of that little to their own 
hands at very short intervals. While the people retain 
their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any 
extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously / 
injure the government in the short space of four years^y 

My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well 
upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost 
by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of 
you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take 
deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking 
time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such 
of you as are now dissatisfied, still have the old Consti- 
tution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the 
laws of your own framing under it; while the new 



FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 1 23 

administration will have no immediate power, if it 
would, to change either. If it were admitted that you 
who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dispute, 
there is still no single reason for precipitate action. 
Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance 
on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land, 
are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our 
present difficulties. 

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, I 
and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. 
The Government will not assail you. You can have 
no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. 
You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the 
Government, while I shall have the most solemn one 
to "preserve, protect, and defend it." 

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but 
friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion 
may have strained, it must not break our bonds of 
affection. The mystic cords of memory, stretching 
from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every liv- 
ing heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, 
will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again 
touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of 
our nature. 

*** When Mr. Lincoln was preparing the foregoing speech, Mr. 
Seward submitted two separate drafts for a closing paragraph. 
The second of these, containing the thought adopted by Mr. Lin- 
coln, was as follows: 

"I close. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but 
fellow-countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained 
our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they 



124 ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 

will not, be broken. The mystic chords which, proceeding from 
so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all 
the hearts and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will 
yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon 
by the guardian angel of the nation." 

A comparison of Mr. Lincoln's closing paragraph with that 
suggested by Mr. Seward will give some idea of Mr. Lincoln's 
terse, nervous and compact style. — Ed. 



ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 

Mr. Lincoln's perceptions were slow, cold, clear, 
and exact. Everything came to him in its precise 
shape and color. To some men the world of matter 
and of man comes ornamented with beauty, life, and 
action; and hence more or less false and inexact. No 
lurking illusion or other error, false in itself and clad 
for the moment in robes of splendor, ever passed 
undetected or unchallenged over the threshold of his 
mind — that point which divides vision from the 
realm and home of thought. Names to him were 
nothing, and titles naught — assumption always stand- 
ing back abashed at his cold, intellectual glare. 
Neither his perceptions nor intellectual vision were 
perverted, distorted, or diseased. He saw all things 
through a perfect mental lens. There was no diffrac- 
tion or refraction there. He was not impulsive, fanci- 
ful, or imaginative; but cold, calm, and precise. He 
threw his whole mental light around the object, and, 
after a time, substance and quality stood apart, form 
and color took their appropriate places, and all was 



ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 1 25 

clear and exact in his mind. His fault, if any, was 
that he saw things less than they really were; less 
beautiful and more frigid. He crushed the unreal, 
the inexact, the hollow, and the sham. He saw things 
in rigidity rather than in vital action. He saw what 
no man could dispute, but he failed to see what might 
have been seen. 

Remembering that Mr. Lincoln's mind moved 
logically, slowly, and cautiously, the question of his 
will and its power is easily solved. Although he 
cared but little for simple facts, rules, and methods, 
he did care for the truth and right of principle. In 
debate he courteously granted all the forms and non- 
essential things to his opponent. Sometimes he 
yielded nine points out of ten. The nine he brushed 
aside as husks or rubbish ; but the tenth, being a ques- 
tion of substance, he clung to with all his might. On 
the underlying principles of truth and justice his will 
was as firm as steel and as tenacious as iron. It was 
as solid, real, and vital as an idea on which the world 
turns. He scorned to support or adopt an untrue 
position, in proportion as his conscience prevented 
him from doing an unjust thing. Ask him to sacri- 
fice in the slightest degree his convictions of truth — as 
he was asked to do when he made his "house-divided- 
against-itself speech" — and his soul would have 
exclaimed with indignant scorn, "The world perish 
first!" Such was Lincoln's will. Because on one line 



126 ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 

of questions — the non-essential — he was pliable, and 
on the other he was as immovable as the rocks, have 
arisen the contradictory notions prevalent regarding 
him. It only remains to say that he was inflexible 
and unbending in human transactions when it was 
necessary to be so, and not otherwise. At one 
moment he was pliable and expansive as gentle air; at 
the next as tenacious and unyielding as gravity itself. 

As illustrative of a combination in Mr. Lincoln's 
organization, it may be said that his eloquence lay in 
the strength of his logical faculty, his supreme power 
of reasoning, his great understanding, and his love of 
principle ; in his clear and accurate vision ; in his cool 
and masterly statement of principles around which the 
issues gather ; and in the statement of those issues and 
the grouping of the facts that are to carry conviction 
to the minds of men of every grade of intelligence. 
He was so clear that he could not be misunderstood 
or long misrepresented. He stood square and bolt 
upright to his convictions, and any one who listened 
to him would be convinced that he formed his thoughts 
and utterances by them. His mind was not exactly a 
wide, broad, generalizing, and comprehensive mind, 
nor yet a versatile, quick, and subtle one, bounding 
here and there as emergencies demanded ; but it was 
deep, enduring, strong, like a majestic machine run- 
ning in deep iron grooves with heavy flanges on its 
wheels. 



ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. I27 

Mr. Lincoln himself was a very sensitive man, and 
hence, in dealing with others, he avoided wounding 
their hearts or puncturing their sensibility. He was 
unusually considerate of the feelings of other men, 
regardless of their rank, condition or station. At first 
sight he struck one with his plainness, simplicity of 
manner, sincerity, candor, and truthfulness. He had 
no double interests and no overwhelming dignity with 
which to chill the air around his visitor. He was 
always easy of approach and thoroughly democratic. 
He seemed to throw a charm around every man who 
ever met him. To be in his presence was a pleasure, 
and no man ever left his company with injured feel- 
ings unless most richly deserved. 

The universal testimony, "He is an honest man," 
gave him a firm hold on the masses, and they trusted 
him with a blind religious faith. His sad, melancholy 
face excited their sympathy, and when the dark days 
came it was their heartstrings that entwined and sus- 
tained him. Sympathy, we are told, is one of the 
strongest and noblest incentives to human action. 
With the sympathy and love of the people to sustain 
him, Lincoln had unlimited power over them; he 
threw an invisible and weightless harness over them, 
and drove them through disaster and desperation to 
final victory. The trust and worship by the people of 
Lincoln were the result of his simple character. He 
held himself not aloof from the masses. He became 
one of them. They feared together, they struggled 



128 ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 

together, they hoped together; thus melted and 
molded into one, they became one in thought, one in 
will, one in action. If Lincoln cautiously awaited the 
full development of the last fact in the great drama 
before he acted, when longer waiting would be a 
crime, he knew that the people were determinedly at 
his back. Thus, when a blow was struck, it came with 
the unerring aim and power of a bolt from heaven. A 
natural king — not ruling men, but leading them along 
the drifts and trends of their own tendencies, always 
keeping in mind the consent of the governed, he 
developed what the future historian will call the 
sublimest order of conservative statesmanship. 

Whatever of life, vigor, force, and power of elo- 
quence his peculiar qualities gave him; whatever 
there was in a fair, manly, honest, and impartial 
administration of justice under law to all men at all 
times; whatever there was in a strong will in the right 
governed by tenderness and mercy; whatever there 
was in toil and sublime patience ; whatever there was 
in these things or a wise combination of them, Lincoln 
is justly entitled to in making the impartial verdict of 
history. These limit and define him as a statesman, 
as an orator, as an executive of the nation, and as a 
man. They developed in all the walks of his life ; they 
were his law; they were his nature, they were Abra- 
ham Lincoln. 

William H. Herndon. 

From "Life of Lincoln." 



LINCOLN'S MANAGEMENT OF MEN. 1 29 



LINCOLN'S MANAGEMENT OF MEN. 

In his conduct of the war he acted upon the theory 
that but one thing was necessary, and that was a 
united North. He had all shades of sentiments and 
opinions to deal with, and the consideration was 
always presented to his mind, how can I hold these 
discordant elements together? It was here that he 
located his own greatness as a President. One time, 
about the middle of the war, I left his house about 1 1 
o'clock at night, at the Soldiers' Home. We had been 
discussing the discords in the country, and particularly 
the States of Missouri and Kentucky. As we 
separated at the door he said, "I may not have made 
as great a President as some other men, but I believe 
I have kept these discordant elements together as well 
as any one could." Hence, in dealing with men he 
was a trimmer, and such a trimmer the worl d lias 
never seen. Halifax, who was great in his day as a 
trimmer, would blush by the side of Lincoln; yet 
Lincoln never trimmed in principles, it was only in his 
conduct with men. He used the patronage of his 
office to feed the hunger of these various factions. 
Weed always declared that he kept a regular account- 
book of his appointments in New York, dividing his 
various favors so as to give each faction more than it 
could get from any other source, yet never enough to 
satisfy its appetite. 



130 LINCOLN S MANAGEMENT OF MEN. 

They all had access to him, they all received favors 
from him, and they all complained of ill treatment; 
but while unsatisfied, they all had "large expecta- 
tions," and saw in him the chance of obtaining more 
than from any one else whom they could be sure of 
getting in his place. He used every force to the best 
possible advantage. He never wasted anything, and 
would always give more to his enemies than he would 
to his friends ; and the reason was, because he never 
had anything to spare, and in the close calculation of 
attaching the factions to him, he counted upon the 
abstract affection of his friends as an element to be 
offset against some gift with which he must appease 
his enemies. Hence, there was always some truth in 
the charge of his friends that he failed to reciprocate 
their devotion with his favors. The reason was, that 
he had only just so much to give away — "He always 
had more horses than oats." 

An adhesion of all forces was indispensable to his 
success and the success of the country; hence he hus- 
banded his means with the greatest nicety of calcula- 
tion. Adhesion was what he wanted; if he got it 
gratuitously he never wasted his substance paying 

for it. 

Leonard Swett. 
From "Herndon's Life of Lincoln." 



A PROCLAMATION. 131 



A PROCLAMATION. 

Whereas, the laws of the United States have been 
for some time past and now are opposed, and the exe- 
cution thereof obstructed, in the States of South 
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, 
Louisiana, and Texas, by combinations too powerful to 
be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial pro- 
ceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by 
law; 

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of 
the United States, in virtue of the power in me vested 
by the Constitution and the laws, have thought fit 
to call forth, and hereby do call forth, the militia of 
the several States of the Union, to the aggregate 
number of seventy-five thousand, in order to suppress 
said combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly 
executed. 

The details for this object will be immediately com- 
municated to the State authorities through the War 
Department. 

I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, 
and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integ- 
rity, and the existence of our National Union, and the 
perpetuity of popular government; and to redress 
wrongs already long enough endured. 

I deem it proper to say that the first service assigned 
to the forces hereby called forth will probably be to 



132 A PROCLAMATION. 

repossess the forts, places, and property which have 
been seized from the Union; and in every event the 
utmost care will be observed, consistently with the 
objects aforesaid, to avoid any devastation, any 
destruction of or interference with property, or any 
disturbance of peaceful citizens of any part of the 
country. 

And I hereby command the persons composing the 
combinations aforesaid to disperse and retire peaceably 
to their respective abodes, within twenty days from 
this date. 

Deeming that the present condition of public affairs 
presents an extraordinary occasion, I do hereby, in 
virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution, 
convene both Houses of Congress. The Senators and 
Representatives are therefore summoned to assemble at 
their respective chambers at twelve o'clock noon, on 
Thursday, the fourth day of July next, then and there 
to consider and determine such measures as, in their 
wisdom, the public safety and interest may seem to 
demand. 

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, 
and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. 

Done at the City of Washington, this fifteenth day 
of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight 
hundred and sixty-one, and of the independence of 
the United States the eighty-fifth. 

By the President : Abraham Lincoln. 

William H. Seward, Secretary of State. 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 1 33 

The following is President Lincoln's first message to 
Congress. It is remarkable (/) as a lucid statement of 
the condition of affairs July \ 1S61, (?) as a reiteration of 
his own position and that of his party, ( j) as a vindica- 
tion of the policy outlined in his inaugural, and {f) as 
an exposition of the meaning of the conflict, not only to 
the American Republic, but to republican government 
everywhere. — Ed. 

MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL 
SESSION. 

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of 
Representatives: — Having been convened on an 
extraordinary occasion, as authorized by the Constitu- 
tion, your attention is not called to any ordinary sub- 
ject of legislation. 

At the beginning of the present Presidential term, 
four months ago, the functions of the Federal Govern- 
ment were found to be generally suspended within the 
several States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, 
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida, excepting only 
those of the Post-office Department. 

Within these States, all the Forts, Arsenals, Dock- 
Yards, Custom-Houses, and the like, including the 
movable and stationary property in and about them, 
had been seized, and were held in open hostility to 
this Government, excepting only Forts Pickens, Tay- 
lor, and Jefferson, on and near the Florida coast, and 



134 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 

Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor, South Carolina. 
The forts thus seized had been put in improved condi- 
tion, new ones had been built, and armed forces had 
been organized and were organizing, all avowedly 
with the same hostile purpose. 

The forts remaining in possession of the Federal 
Government in and near these States were either 
besieged or menaced by warlike preparations, and 
especially Fort Sumter was nearly surrounded by well- 
protected hostile batteries, with guns equal in quality 
to the best of its own, and outnumbering the latter as 
perhaps ten to one. A disproportionate share of the 
Federal muskets and rifles had somehow found their 
way into these States, and had been seized to be used] 
against the Government. 

Accumulations of the public revenue lying within 
them had been seized for the same object. The 
navy was scattered in distant seas, leaving but a 
very small part of it within the immediate reach 
of the Government. Officers of the Federal Army and 
Navy had resigned in great numbers; and of those 
resigning a large proportion had taken up arms against 
the Government. 

Simultaneously, and in connection with all this, the 
purpose to sever the Federal Union was openly 
avowed. In accordance with this purpose, an ordi- 
nance had been adopted in each of these States, declar- 
ing the States respectively to be separated from the 
National Union. A formula for instituting a combined 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 135 

Government of these States had been promulgated; 
and this illegal organization, in the character of Con- 
federate "States," was already invoking recognition, 
aid, and intervention from foreign powers. 

Finding this condition of things, and believing it to 
be an imperative duty upon the incoming Executive to 
prevent, if possible, the consummation of such attempt 
to destroy the Federal Union, a choice of means to that 
end became indispensable. This choice was made and 
was declared in the Inaugural Address. 

The policy chosen looked to the exhaustion of all 
peaceful measures before a resort to any stronger 
ones. It sought only to hold the public places and 
property not already wrested from the Government, 
and to collect the revenue, relying for the rest on 
time, discussion, and the ballot-box. It promised a 
continuance of the mails, at Government expense, to 
the very people who were resisting the Government ; 
and it gave repeated pledges against any disturbance 
to any of the people, or any of their rights. Of all 
that which a President might constitutionally and 
justifiably do in such a case, everything was forborne 
without which it was believed possible to keep the 
Government on foot. 

On the 5th of March (the present incumbent's first 
full day in office), a letter from Major Anderson, com- 
manding at Fort Sumter, written on the 28th of 
February and received at the War Department on the 
4th of March, was by that Department placed in his 



136 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 

hands. This letter expressed the professional opinion 
of the writer that reinforcements could not be thrown 
into that fort within the time for its relief rendered 
necessary by the limited supply of provisions, and with 
a view of holding possession of the same, with a force 
of less that twenty thousand good and well-disciplined 
men. This opinion was concurred in by all the officers 
of his command, and their memoranda on the subject 
were made inclosures of Major Anderson's letter. 
The whole was immediately laid before Lieutenant- 
General Scott, who at once concurred with Major 
Anderson in his opinion. On reflection, however, he 
took full time, consulting with other officers, both of the 
Army and Navy, and at the end of four days came 
reluctantly but decidedly to the same conclusion as 
before. He also stated at the same time that no such 
sufficient force was then at the control of the Govern- 
ment, or could be raised and brought to the ground 
within the time when the provisions in the fort would 
be exhausted. 

In a purely military point of view, this reduced the 
duty of the Administration in the case to the mere 
matter of getting the garrison safely out of the fort. 

It was believed, however, that to so abandon that 
position, under the circumstances, would be utterly 
ruinous ; that the necessity under which it was to be 
done would not be fully understood ; that by many it 
would be construed as a part of a voluntary policy; 
that at home it would discourage the friends of the 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 137 

Union, embolden its adversaries, and go far to insure 
to the latter a recognition abroad; that, in fact, it 
would be our national destruction consummated. This 
could not be allowed. Starvation was not yet upon 
the garrison, and ere it would be reached Fort Pickens 
might be reinforced. This last would be a clear indi- 
cation of policy, and would better enable the country 
to accept the evacuation of Fort Sumter as a military 
necessity. An order was at once directed to be sent 
for the landing of the troops from the steamship 
Brooklyn into Fort Pickens. This order could not go 
by land, but must take the longer and slower route by 
sea. The first return news from the order was 
received just one week before the fall of Sumter. 
The news itself was that the officer commanding the 
Sabine, to which vessel the troops had been trans- 
ferred from the Brooklyn, acting upon some quasi 
armistice of the late Administration (and of the exist- 
ence of which the present Administration, up to the 
time the order was dispatched, had only too vague 
and uncertain rumors to fix attention), had refused to 
land the troops. To now reinforce Fort Pickens 
before a crisis would be reached at Fort Sumter was 
impossible — rendered so by the near exhaustion of 
provisions in the latter named fort. In precaution 
against such a conjuncture, the Government had, a few 
days before, commenced preparing an expedition, as 
well adapted as might be to relieve Fort Sumter, 
which expedition was intended to be ultimately used, 



138 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 

or not, according to circumstances. The strongest 
anticipated case for using it was now presented, and 
it was resolved to send it forward, as had been 
intended in this contingency. It was also resolved to 
notify the Governor of South Carolina that he might 
expect an attempt would be made to provision the 
fort; and that, if the attempt should not be resisted, 
there would be no attempt to throw in men, arms, or 
ammunition, without further notice, or in case of an 
attack upon the fort. This notice was accordingly 
given; whereupon the fort was attacked and bom- 
barded to its fall, without even awaiting the arrival of 
the provisioning expedition. 

It is thus seen that the assault upon and reduction 
of Fort Sumter was in no sense a matter of self- 
defense on the part of the assailants. They well 
knew that the garrison in the fort could by no possi- 
bility commit aggression upon them. They knew — 
they were expressly notified — that the giving of bread 
to the few brave and hungry men of the garrison was all 
V which would on that occasion be attempted, unless 
themselves, by resisting so much, should provoke 
more. They knew that this Government desired to 
keep the garrison in the fort, not to assail them, but 
merely to maintain visible possession, and thus to 
preserve the Union from actual and immediate disso- 
lution — trusting, as hereinbefore stated, to time, dis- 
cussion, and the ballot-box for final adjustment; and 
they assailed and reduced the fort for precisely the 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 1 39 

reverse object — to drive out the visible authority of 
the Federal Union, and thus force it to immediate 
dissolution. 

That this was their object the Executive well under- 
stood ; and having said to them in the Inaugural Ad- 
dress, "You can have no conflict without being your- 
selves the aggressors, ' ' he took pains not only to keep 
this declaration good, but also to keep the case so far 
from ingenious sophistry that the world should not mis- 
understand it. By the affair at Fort Sumter, with its sur- 
rounding circumstances, that point was reached. Then 
and thereby the assailants of the Government began the 
conflict of arms, without a gun in sight or in expect- 
ancy to return their fire, save only the few in the fort 
sent to that harbor years before for their own protec- 
tion, and still ready to give that protection in what- 
ever was lawful. In this act, discarding all else, they 
have forced upon the country the distinct issue, 
"immediate dissolution or blood." 

And this issue embraces more than the fate of 
these United States. It presents to the whole family 
of man the question | whether a Constitutional 
Republic or Democracy — a government of the people, 
by the same people, — can or cannot maintain its 
territorial integrity against its own domestic foes. It 
presents the question whether discontented individ- 
uals, too few in numbers to control administration 
according to the organic law in any case, can always, 
upon the pretenses made in this case, or any other 



/ 



140 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 

pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break 
up their Government, and thus practically put an end 
to free government upon the earth. It forces us to 
ask: Is there, m all republics, this inherent and 
fatal weakness?" "Must a Government, of necessity, 
be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or 
too weak to maintain its own existence?" So viewing 
the issue, no choice was left but to call out the war 
power of the Government; and so to resist the force 
employed for its destruction, by force for its preserva- 
tion. 

The call was made, and the response of the country 
was most gratifying, surpassing in unanimity and 
spirit the most sanguine expectation. Yet none of the 
States commonly called Slave States, except Delaware, 
gave a regiment through regular State organization. 
A few regiments have been organized within some 
others of those States by individual enterprise, and 
received into the Government service. Of course the 
seceded States, so called (and to which Texas had 
been joined about the time of the inauguration), gave 
no troops to the cause of the Union. The Border 
States, so called, were not uniform in their action, 
some of them being almost for the Union, while in 
others — as in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, 
and Arkansas — the Union sentiment was nearly 
repressed and silenced. 

The course taken in Virginia was the most re- 
markable — perhaps the most important. A Con- 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 141 

vention elected by the people of that State to 
consider this very question of disrupting the Federal 
Union was in session at the capital of Virginia 
when Fort Sumter fell. To this body the people 
had chosen a large majority of professed Union men. 
Almost immediately after the fall of Sumter, many 
members of that majority went over to the original 
disunion minority, and with them adopted an ordi- 
nance for withdrawing the State from the Union. 
Whether this change was wrought by their great 
approval of the assault upon Sumter, or their great 
resentment at the Government's resistance to that 
^assault, is not definitely known. Although they sub- 
mitted the ordinance for ratification to a vote of the 
people, to be taken on a day then somewhat more 
than a month distant, the Convention and the Legis- 
lature, which was also in session at the same time and 
place, with leading men of the State not members of 
either, immediately commenced acting as if the State 
were already out of the Union. They pushed military 
preparations vigorously forward all over the State. 
They seized the United States Armory at Harper's 
Ferry, and the Navy Yard at Gosport, near Norfolk. 
They received — perhaps invited — into their State large 
bodies of troops, with their warlike appointments, 
from the so-called seceded States. They formally 
entered into a treaty of temporary alliance with 
the so-called "Confederate States," and sent members 
to their Congress at Montgomery. And, finally, they 



142 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 

permitted the insurrectionary Government to be trans- 
ferred to their capitol at Richmond. 

The people of Virginia have thus allowed this giant 
insurrection to make its nest within her borders; and 
this Government has no choice left but to deal with it 
where it finds it, and it has the less to regret as the 
loyal citizens have, in due form, claimed its protection. 
Those loyal citizens this Government is bound to 
recognize and protect, as being in Virginia. In the 
Border States, so called, — in fact the Middle States, — 
there are those who favor a policy which they call 
"armed neutrality" ; that is, an arming of those States 
to prevent the Union forces passing one way, or the 
disunion forces the other, over their soil. This would 
be disunion completed. Figuratively speaking, it would 
be the building of an impassable wall along the line of 
separation, — and yet not quite an impassable one, for 
under the guise of neutrality it would tie the hands of 
the Union men, and freely pass supplies from among 
them to the insurrectionists, which it could not do as an 
open enemy. At a stroke it would take all the trouble 
off the hands of secession, except only what proceeds 
from the external blockade. It would do for the dis- 
unionists that which, of all things, they most desire — 
feed them well, and give them disunion without a 
struggle of their own. It recognizes no fidelity to the 
Constitution, no obligation to maintain the Union; 
and while very many who have favored it are doubtless 
loyal citizens, it is, nevertheless, very injurious in effect. 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 143 

Recurring to the action of the Government, it may 
be stated that at first a call was made for seventy-five 
thousand militia ; and, rapidly following this, a procla- 
mation was issued for closing the ports of the insurrec- 
tionary districts by proceedings in the nature of 
a blockade. So far all was believed to be strictly 
legal. 

At this point the insurrectionists announced their 
purpose to enter upon the practice of privateering. 

Other calls were made for volunteers to serve three 
years, unless sooner discharged, and also for large 
additions to the regular army and navy. These 
measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured 
upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand 
and a public necessity; trusting then, as now, that 
Congress would ratify them. It is believed that 
nothing has been done beyond the constitutional com- 
petency of Congress. 

Soon after the first call for militia, it was considered 
a duty to authorize the commanding general in proper 
cases, according to his discretion, to suspend the 
privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or, in other 
words, to arrest and detain, without resort to the ordi- 
nary processes and forms of law, such individuals as 
he might deem dangerous to the public safety. This 
authority has purposely been exercised but very 
sparingly. Nevertheless, the legality and propriety 
of what has been done under it are questioned, and the 
attention of the country has been called to the proposi- 



144 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 

tion that one who has sworn to "take care that the 
laws be faithfully executed" should not himself violate 
them. Of course some consideration was given to the 
questions of power and propriety before this matter 
was acted upon. The whole of the laws which were 
required to be faithfully executed were being resisted 
and failing of execution in nearly one-third of the 
States. Must they be allowed to finally fail of execu- 
tion, even had it been perfectly clear that by use of 
the means necessary to their execution some single 
law, made in such extreme tenderness of the citizen's 
liberty that, practically, it relieves more of the guilty 
than the innocent, should to a very great extent be 
violated? To state the question more directly, are all 
the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Govern- 
ment itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated? 
Even in such a case, would not the official oath be 
broken if the Government should be overthrown, 
when it was believed that disregarding the single law 
would tend to preserve it? But it was not believed 
that this question was presented. It was not believed 
that any law was violated. 

The provision of the Constitution that "the privilege 
of the writ of habeas corpus* shall not be suspended, 
unless when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the 



*The writ commanding a person having another in custody to 
produce the body of the person detained, with the day and cause 
of his capture and detention, and to do, submit to, and receive 
whatever the judge or court shall consider in that behalf. — Stand- 
ard Dictionary : 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 1 45 

public safety may require it," is equivalent to a pro- 
vision that such privilege may be suspended when, 
in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety 
does require it. It was decided that we have a case 
of rebellion, and that the public safety does re- 
quire the qualified suspension of the privilege of 
the writ which was authorized to be made. Now it 
is insisted that Congress, and not the Executive, is 
vested with this power. But the Constitution itself is 
silent as to which or who is to exercise the power; 
and as the provision was plainly made for a dangerous 
emergency, it cannot be believed that the framers of 
the instrument intended that in every case the 
danger should run its course until Congress could be 
called together, the very assembling of which might 
be prevented, as was intended in this case, by the 
rebellion. 

No more extended argument is now offered, as an 
opinion at some length will probably be presented by 
the Attorney-General. Whether there shall be any 
legislation upon the subject, and if any, what, is sub- 
mitted entirely to the better judgment of Congress. 

The forbearance of this Government had been so 
extraordinary and so long continued as to lead some 
foreign nations to shape their action as if they sup- 
posed the early destruction of our National Union was 
probable. While this, on discovery, gave the Execu- 
tive some concern, he is now happy to say that the 
sovereignty and rights of the United States are now 



I46 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 

everywhere practically respected by foreign powers; 
and a general sympathy with the country is mani- 
fested throughout the world. 

The reports of the Secretaries of the Treasury, War, 
and the Navy will give the information in detail 
deemed necessary and convenient for your delibera- 
tion and action; while the Executive and all the 
Departments will stand ready to supply omissions or 
to communicate new facts considered important for 
you to know. It is now recommended that you give 
the legal means for making this contest a short and 
decisive one: that you place at the control of the 
Government for the work at least 400,000 men and 
$400,000,000. That number of men is about one- 
tenth of those of proper ages within the regions 
where, apparently, all are willing to engage; and the 
sum is less than a twenty-third part of the money 
value owned by the men who seem ready to devote 
the whole. A debt of $600,000,000 now is a less sum 
per head than was the debt of our Revolution when 
we came out of that struggle ; and the money value in 
the country bears even a greater proportion to what it 
was then than does the population. Surely each man 
has as strong a motive now to preserve our liberties as 
each had then to establish them. 

A right result at this time will be worth more to the 
world than ten times the men and ten times the 
money. The evidence reaching us from the country 
leaves no doubt that the material for the work is 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 147 

abundant, and that it needs only the hand of legisla- 
tion to give it legal sanction, and the hand of the 
Executive to give it practical shape and efficiency. 
One of the greatest perplexities of the Government is 
to avoid receiving troops faster than it can provide for 
them. In a word, the people will save their Govern- 
ment if the Government will do its part only indiffer- 
ently well. 

It might seem, at first thought, to be of little differ- 
ence whether the present movement at the South be 
called "secession" or "rebellion." The movers, 
however, well understand the difference. At the 
beginning they knew that they could never raise their 
treason to any respectable magnitude by any name 
which implies violation of law. They knew their 
people possessed as much of moral sense, as much of 
devotion to law and order, and as much pride in and 
reverence for the history and government of their 
common country as any other civilized and patriotic 
people. They knew they could make no advancement 
directly in the teeth of these strong and noble senti- 
ments. Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious 
debauching of the public mind. They invented an 
ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was followed by 
perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, of 
the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism 
itself is that any State of the Union may consistently 
with the nation's Constitution, and therefore lawfully 
and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the 



148 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 

consent of the Union or of any other State. The 
little disguise that the supposed right is to be exer- 
cised only for just cause, themselves to he the sole 
judges of its justice, is too thin to merit any notice. 

With rebellion thus sugar-coated they have been 
drugging the public mind of their section for more 
than thirty years, and until at length they have 
brought many good men to a willingness to take up 
arms against the Government the day after some 
assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense 
of taking their State out of the Union, who could have 
been brought to no such thing the day before. 

This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of 
its currency from the assumption that there is some 
omnipotent and sacred supremacy pertaining to a 
State — to each State of our Federal Union. Our 
States have neither more nor less power than that 
reserved to them in the Union by the Constitution — 
no one of them ever having been a State out of the 
Union. The original ones passed into the Union 
before they cast off their British Colonial depend- 
ence; and the new ones came into the Union 
directly from a condition of dependence, excepting 
Texas. And even Texas, in its temporary independ- 
ence, was never designated a State. The new ones 
only took the designation of States on coming into 
the Union, while that name was first adopted for the 
old ones in and by the Declaration of Independence. 
Therein the "United Colonies" were declared to be 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 149 

"free and independent States"; but even then the 
object plainly was not to declare their independence 
of one another or of the Union, but directly the con- 
trary, as their mutual pledge and their mutual action 
before, at the time, and afterward, abundantly show. 
The express plighting of faith by each and all of the 
original thirteen in the Articles of Confederation, two 
years later, that the Union shall be perpetual, is most 
conclusive. Having never been States either in 
substance or in name outside of the Union, whence 
this magical omnipotence of "State rights," asserting 
a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself? 
Much is said about the "sovereignty" of the States; 
but the word even is not in the National Constitution, 
nor, as is believed, in any of the State constitutions. 
What is "sovereignty" in the political sense of the 
word? Would it be far wrong to define it "a political 
community without a political superior"? Tested by 
this, no one of our States, except Texas, was a sover- 
eignty, and even Texas gave up the character on 
coming into the Union; by which act she acknowl- 
edged the Constitution of the United States, and 
the laws and treaties of the United States made in 
pursuance of the Constitution, to be for her the 
supreme law. The States have their status in the 
Union, and they have no other legal status. If they 
break from this, they can only do so against law and 
bv revolution. The Union , and not themselves 
separately, procured their independence and their 



150 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 

liberty, by conquest or purchase. The Union gave 
each of them whatever of independence and liberty it 
has. The Union is older than any of the States, and, 
in fact, it created them as States. Originally, some 
dependent Colonies made the Union, and in turn the 
Union threw off their old dependence for them, and 
made them States, such as they are. Not one of 
them ever had a State constitution independent of 
the Union. Of course, it is not forgotten that all the 
new States framed their constitutions before they 
entered the Union — nevertheless, dependent upon and 
preparatory to coming into the Union. 

Unquestionably the States have the powers and 
rights reserved to them in and by the National Con- 
stitution ; but among these surely are not included all 
conceivable powers, however mischievous or destruc- 
tive, but, at most, such only as were known in the 
world at the time as governmental powers; and cer- 
tainly a power to destroy the Government itself had 
never been known as a governmental, as a merely 
administrative power. This relative matter of 
National power and State rights, as a principle, is no 
other than the principle of generality and locality. 
Whatever concerns the whole should be confided to 
the whole — to the General Government; while what- 
ever concerns only the State should be left exclusively 
to the State. This is all there is of original principle 
about it. Whether the National Constitution in defin- 
ing boundaries between the two has applied the prin- 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 151 

ciple with exact accuracy is not to be questioned. We 
are all bound by that defining, without question. 

What is now combatted is the position that secession 
is consistent with the Constitution — is lawful and 
peaceful. It is not contended that there is any 
express law for it; and nothing should ever be implied 
as law which leads to unjust or absurd consequences. 
The nation purchased with money the countries out of 
which several of these States were formed. Is it just 
that they shall go off without leave and without 
refunding? The nation paid very large sums (in the 
aggregate, I believe, nearly a hundred millions) to re- 
lieve Florida of the aboriginal tribes. Is it just that she 
shall now be off without consent or without any return? 
The nation is now in debt for money applied to the 
benefit of these so-called seceding States in common 
with the rest. Is it just either that creditors shall go 
unpaid or the remaining States pay the whole? A 
part of the present National debt was contracted to 
pay the old debts of Texas. Is it just that she shall 
leave and pay no part of this herself? Again, if 
one State may secede, so may another; and when 
all shall have seceded, none is left to pay the debts. 
Is this quite just to creditors? Did we notify them 
of this sage view of ours when we borrowed their 
money? If we now recognize this doctrine by allow- 
ing the seceders to go in peace, it is difficult to see 
what we can do if others choose to go or to extort 
terms upon which they will promise to remain. 



152 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION. 

The seceders insist that our Constitution admits of 
secession. They have assumed to make a National 
Constitution of their own, in which of necessity they 
have either discarded or retained the right of seces- 
sion, as they insist exists in ours. If they have dis- 
carded it, they thereby admit that on principle it 
ought not to exist in ours. If they have retained it, by 
their own construction of ours they show that to be 
consistent they must secede from one another when- 
ever they shall find it the easiest way of settling their 
debts, or effecting any other selfish or unjust object. 

(The principle itself is one of disintegration, and upon 
which no Government can possibly endure. 

If all the States save one should assert the power to 
drive that one out of the Union, it is presumed the 
whole class of seceder politicians would at once deny 
the power and denounce the act as the greatest out- 
rage upon State rights. But suppose that precisely 
the same act, instead of being called "driving the one 
out," should be called "the seceding of the others 
ifrom that one," it would be exactly what the seceders 
claim to do, unless, indeed, they make the point that 
the one, because it is a minority, may rightfully do 
what the others, because they are a majority, may not 
rightfully do. These politicians are subtle and pro- 
found in the rights of minorities. They are not 
partial to that power which made the Constitution and 
speaks from the preamble calling itself "We, the 
people." 



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154 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN" SPECIAL SESSION. 

petent to administer the Government itself. Nor 
do I say this is not true also in the army of our late 
friends, now adversaries in this contest; but if it 
is, so much better the reason why the Government 
which has conferred such benefits on both them and us 
should not be broken up. Whoever in any section 
proposes to abandon such a Government would do well 
to consider in deference to what principle it is that he 
does it — what better he is likely to get in its stead — 
whether the substitute will give, or be intended to 
give, so much of good to the people. There are some 

E shadowings on this subject. Our adversaries have 
adopted some declarations of independence in which 
unlike our good old one. penned by Jefferson, they 
omit the words "all men are created equal." Why? 
They have adopted a temporary National Constitution, 
in the preamble of which, unlike our good old one, 
signed by Washington, they omit "We, the people," 
and substitute "We, the deputies of the sovereig n and 
i:;.'..- . -'.;;.: States." Why? Why this deliberate 
pressing out of view the rights of men and the 
authority of the people? 

T'. : - •- .—-"-". ..".y a people's c;:::es:. On the side 
of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the 
world that form and substance of Government whose 
leading object is to elevate the condition of men — to lift 
artificial weights from all shoulders: to dear the paths 
of laudable pursuit for all ; to afford all an unfettered 
start, and a fair chance in the race of life. Yielding 



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156 :. ESE - ft) CONGRESS IN SPECIAL SESSION 

:..r_ ca - supp ress .. re . lion; that ballots are the 

ol and peaceful successors of bullets; and that 

ben ballots : and ixmstitutionally decided, 

t are can be no successful appeal back to bi 5ts :hat 
! .an be no successful appeal, except to ballots 

, . ■-. - at succeeding elections. Such will be a 
i rat lesson of peace : teaching men that what they 
cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by 
- - ..: teaching all the folly of being the beginners of 
a _r 

Lest there should be some uneasiness in the minds 
of candid men as to what is to be the course of the 
Government toward the Southern States after the 
rebellion shall have been suppressed, the Executive 
deems it proper to say it will be his purpose then, as 
ever, to be guided by the Constitution and the laws ; 
and that he probably will have no different under- 
standing of the powers and duties of the Federal 
Government relatively to the rights of the States and 
the people, under the Constitution, than that expressed 
in the Inaugural Address. He desires to preserve the 
Government, that it may be administered for all as it 
was administered by the men who made it. Loyal 
citizens everywhere have a right to claim this of 
their Government, and the Government has no right 
to withhold or neglect it. It is not perceived that in 
giving it there is any coercion, conquest or subjuga- 
tion in any just sense of those terms. 

The Constitution provides, and all the States have 



i 

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- 

: ! 
: 

-•J ~~- - 



'.'- " -■ : 

- 



158 Lincoln's mode of life at the white house. 

done what he has deemed his duty. You will now, 
according to your own judgment, perform yours. He 
sincerely hopes that your views and your actions may 
so accord with his as to assure all faithful citizens who 
have been disturbed in their rights of a certain and 
speedy restoration to them, under the Constitution 
and laws. And having thus chosen our course with- 
out guile and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust 
in God, and go forward without fear and with manly 

hearts. 

Abraham Lincoln. 
July 4, 1 86 1. 



LINCOLN'S MODE OF LIFE AT THE WHITE 
HOUSE. 

Lincoln went to bed ordinarily from ten to eleven 
o'clock, unless he happened to be kept up by impor- 
tant news, in which case he would frequently remain at 
the War Department till one or two. He rose 
early. When he lived in the country at the Soldiers' 
Home he would be up and dressed, eat his breakfast 
(which was extremely frugal, an egg, a piece of toast, 
coffee, etc.), and ride into Washington, all before eight 
o'clock. In the winter, at the White House, he was 
not quite so early. He did not sleep well, but spent a 
good while in bed. "Tad" usually slept with him. 
He would lie around the office until he fell asleep, and 
Lincoln would shoulder him and take him off to bed. 



__:■ "I . . . 



— 

; 

— — - 



- 



■ 
- 

- 

i: 2IE. - 

- 

: 



160 Lincoln's mode of life at the white house. 

mer. He dined between five and six, and we went 
off to our dinner also. Before dinner was over, mem- 
bers and Senators would come back and take up the 
whole evening. Sometimes, though rarely, he shut 
himself up and would see no one. Sometimes he 
would run away to a lecture, or concert, or theater, for 
the sake of a little rest. He was very abstemious — ate 
less than any man I know. He drank nothing but 
water, not from principle but because he did not like 
wine or spirits. Once, in rather dark days early in the 
war, a temperance committee came to him and said 
that the reason we did not win was because our army 
drank so much whisky as to bring the curse of the 
Lord upon them. He said it was rather unfair on the 
part of the aforesaid curse, as the other side drank 
more and worse whisky than ours did. He read very 
little. He scarcely ever looked into a newspaper 
unless I called his attention to an article on some 
special subject. He frequently said, "I know more 
about it than any of them. " It is absurd to call him a 
modest man. No great man was ever modest. It 
was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious 
assumption of superiority that men like Chase and 
Sumner never could forgive. I believe that Lincoln 
is well understood by the people; but there is a 
patent-leather, kid-glove set who know no more of 
him than an owl does of a comet blazing into his 
blinking eyes. Their estimates of him are in many 
cases disgraceful exhibitions of ignorance and preju- 



-\-i>_: . l.l _.. .; -si -. ~". : 



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: 



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I .' ; x . ! - ' ■ \ \ . I ' ' \ \ 

. tist . ... . . ■ . . 91 " .■ 

v. g t to oc - - . . . ect it 

Phe Federal G ■ - • ■ ■ . . ts highest 

&st d such i measure as i - - the most 

cient ••;- 54 ESC -' •. BTS Ol 

: be ECZ -: |g "-..;. tin the hope that this 

G .■-.':■' . ' . . ' 

. . U ■ :: ol sou e .■ : of the d saJ fected 
. St .. - • ■ : ■ : sncl 
. - . ""the Union ggled 

bf tg . aad gone, we s se to g th the 

. • • sect To depi - h< t his 

snbsta s the '. the mil 

Pit as to aU 
the States g I C . ■■ . - ■■ . 

soon, if at all, 
it that while the Ear is 
. . northern shall s .- 
certain bo the do - - .:hern that in 
no e- ■•- the former ever join the latter in 

- I say d . .. eca tsc m 

gjrad tsudde don is 

. . i :'. -. ..... In the mere 

*ress th the census 

treas - at him, c an rea .. y sc e for 

DselE eary soon the en tores ol 

..: would [ . ■ .-. at a r ..':..: -.. ." the 

Such a proposition on the 

if the S 3ovearnment sets up no claim of a 



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- . 



164 MESSAGE TO CONGRESS. 

results. In full view of my great responsibility to my 

God and to my country, I earnestly beg the attention 

of Congress and the people to the subject. 

Abraham Lincoln. 
March 6, 1862. 



MESSAGE TO CONGRESS. 

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of 
Representatives: — The act entitled "An act for the 
release of certain persons held to service or labor in 
the District of Columbia" has this day been approved 
and signed. 

I have never doubted the constitutional authority of 
Congress to abolish slavery in this District ; and I have 
ever desired to see the National Capital freed from the 
institution in some satisfactory way. Hence there has 
never been in my mind any question upon the subject 
except the one of expediency, arising in view of all the 
circumstances. If there be matters within and about 
this act which might have taken a course or shape 
more satisfactory to my judgment, I do not attempt to 
specify them. I am gratified that the two principles 
of compensation and colonization are both recognized 
and practically applied in the act. 

In the matter of compensation, it is provided that 
claims may be presented within ninety days from the 
passage of the act, "but not thereafter"; and there is 



= 







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-Z^-Z' ~__" I_: ~ ___ _ . _- _ _ __ f- ._-.tr- 









l66 REVOKING GENERAL HUNTER'S ORDER. 

And Whereas the same is producing some excite- 
ment and misunderstanding : 

Therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the 
United States, proclaim and declare that the Govern- 
ment of the United States had no knowledge, informa- 
tion, or belief of an intention on the part of General 
Hunter to issue such a proclamation; nor has it yet 
any authentic information that the document is 
genuine. And further, that neither General Hunter, 
nor any other commander or person, has been author- 
ized by the Government of the United States to make 
a proclamation declaring the slaves of any State free ; 
and that the supposed proclamation now in question, 
whether genuine or false, is altogether void so far as 
respects such declaration. 

I further make known that, whether it be competent 
for me, as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, 
to declare the slaves of any State or States free, and 
whether, at any time, or in any case, it shall become a 
necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the 
Government to exercise such supposed power, are 
questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to 
myself, and which I cannot feel justified in leaving to 
the decision of commanders in the field. These are 
totally different questions from those of police regula- 
tions in armies and camps. 

On the 6th day of March last, by a special message, 
I recommended to Con^rx-vs the adoption of a joint 
resolution, to be substantially as follows: 



-_ _.. . ;-----__ E _ -.- 




-11.2 



-- — 



• .r_ _: . 



-.;--; ...::_; 






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; 



l68 AUTHORIZING EMPLOYMENT OF CONTRABANDS. 

hundred and sixty-two, and of the Independence of 
the United States the eighty-sixth. 

By the President: Abraham Lincoln. 

William H. Seward, Secretary of State. 



ORDER AUTHORIZING EMPLOYMENT OF 
CONTRABANDS. 

War Department, Washington, July 22, 1862. 

First. Ordered that military commanders within the 
States of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, 
Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and 
Arkansas, in an ordinary manner seize and use any 
property, real or personal, which may be necessary or 
convenient for their several commands, for supplies, 
or for other military purposes; and that while prop- 
erty may be destroyed for proper military objects, 
none shall be destroyed in wantonness or malice. 

Second. That military and naval commanders shall 
employ as laborers, within and from said States, so 
many persons of African descent as can be advan- 
tageously used for military or naval purposes, giving 
them reasonable wages for their labor. 

Third. That, as to both property and persons of 
African descent, accounts shall be kept sufficiently 
accurate and in detail to show quantities and amounts, 
and from whom both property and such persons shall 
have come, as a basis upon which compensation can be 



LETTER TO HORACE GREELEY. 169 

made in proper cases ; and the several departments of 
this Government shall attend to and perform their 
appropriate parts toward the execution of these orders. 
By order of the President : 

Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War. 



LETTER TO HORACE GREELEY. 

Executive Mansion, Washington, Aug. 22, 1862. 
Hon. Horace Greeley. 

Dear Sir: — I have just read yours of the 19th, 
addressed to myself through the New York Tribune. 
If there be in it any statements or assumptions of fact 
which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and 
here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences 
which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not, now 
and here, argue against them. If there be perceptible 
in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in 
deference to an old friend whose heart I have always 
supposed to be right. 

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing," as you 
say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. 

I would save the Union. I would save it the short- 
est way under the Constitution. The sooner the 
National authority can be restored, the nearer the 
Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be 
those who would not save the Union unless they could 
at the same time save Slavery, I do not agree with 



170 PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 

them. If there be those who would not save the 
Union unless they could at the same time destroy 
Slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount 
object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not 
either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the 
Union without freeing any slave, I would do it ; and 
if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do 
it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving 
others alone, I would also do that. What I do about 
Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it 
helps to save the Union ; and what I forbear, I forbear 
because I do not believe it would help to save the 
Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what 
I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more when- 
ever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I 
shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, 
and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall 
appear to be true views. I have here stated my pur- 
pose according to my view of official duty; and I 
intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal 
wish that all men everywhere could be free. Yours, 

A. Lincoln. 



PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION PROCLAMA- 
TION. 

I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States 
of America, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and 
Navy thereof, do hereby proclaim and declare that 




^/y&eskscarfr+s 



PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 171 

hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted 
for the object of practically restoring the constitu- 
tional relation between the United States and each of 
the States, and the people thereof, in which States 
that relation is or may be suspended or disturbed. 
That it is my purpose, upon the next meeting of Con- 
gress, to again recommend the adoption of a practical 
measure tendering pecuniary aid to the free accept- 
ance or rejection of all the Slave States, so-called, the 
people whereof may not then be in rebellion against 
the United States, and which States may then have 
voluntarily adopted, or thereafter may voluntarily 
adopt, the immediate or gradual abolishment of slavery 
within their respective limits; and that the effort to 
colonize persons of African descent with their consent 
upon this continent or elsewhere, with the previously 
obtained consent of the government existing there, 
will be continued. That on the first day of January, 
in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred 
and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any 
State or any designated part of a State the people 
whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United 
States, shall be tJien, tJience forward and forever free; 
and the Executive Government of the United States, 
including the military and naval authority thereof, 
will recognize and maintain the freedom of such per- 
sons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, 
or any of them, in any efforts they may make for 
their actual freedom. That the Executive will, on 



172 PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 

the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation 
designate the States and parts of States, if any, in 
which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be 
in rebellion against the United States; and the fact 
that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that 
day be in good faith represented in the Congress of 
the United States by members chosen thereto at 
elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of 
such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence 
of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclu- 
sive evidence that such State and the people thereof 
are not then in rebellion against the United States. 

That attention is hereby called to an act of Con- 
gress entitled "An act to make an additional article of 
war," approved March 13, 1862, and which act is in 
the words and figures following: 

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of 
the United States of America in Congress assembled, That here- 
after the following shall be promulgated as an additional Article of 
War, for the government of the Army of the United States, and 
shall be observed and obeyed as such : 

Article All officers or persons in the military or naval service 

of the United States are prohibited from employing any of the 
forces under their respective commands for the purpose of return- 
ing fugitives from service or labor who may have escaped from 
any persons to whom such service or labor is claimed to be due ; 
and any officer who shall be found guilty by a court-martial of 
violating this article shall be dismissed from the service. 

Section 2. And be it further enacted, That this act shall take 
effect from and after its passage. 

Also to the ninth and tenth sections of an act 
entitled "An act to suppress insurrection, to punish 



PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. I 73 

treason and rebellion, to seize and confiscate prop- 
erty of rebels, and for other purposes," approved July 
17, 1862, and which sections are in the words and 
figures following: 

Section 9. And be it further enacted. That all slaves of persons 
who shall hereafter be engaged in rebellion against the govern- 
ment of the United States, or who shall in any way give aid or 
comfort thereto, escaping from such persons and taking refuge 
within the lines of the army ; and all slaves captured from such 
persons or deserted by them, and coming under the control of the 
government of the United States ; and all slaves of such persons 
found on (or being within) any place occupied by rebel forces 
and afterwards occupied by the forces of the United States, shall 
be deemed captives of war, and shall be forever free of their serv- 
itude, and not again held as slaves. 

Section 10. And be it further enacted, That no slave escaping 
into any State, Territory, or the District of Columbia, from any 
other State, shall be delivered up, or in any way impeded or hin- 
dered of his liberty, except for crime, or some offense against the 
laws, unless the person claiming said fugitive shall first make oath 
that the person to whom the labor or service of such fugitive is 
alleged to be due is his lawful owner, and has not been in arms 
against the United States in the present rebellion, nor in any way 
given aid and comfort thereto; and no person engaged in the 
military or naval service of the United States shall, under any 
pretense whatever, assume to decide on the validity of the claim 
of any person to the service or labor of any other person, or sur- 
render up any such person to the claimant, on pain of being dis- 
missed from the service. 

And I do hereby enjoin upon and order all persons 
engaged in the military and naval service of the 
United States to observe, obey, and enforce, within 
their respective spheres of service, the act and sec- 
tions above recited. 

And the Executive will in due time recommend that 



174 FINAL EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 

all citizens of the United States who shall have 
remained loyal thereto throughout the rebellion shall 
(upon the restoration of the constitutional relation 
between the United States and their respective States 
and people, if that relation shall have been suspended 
or disturbed) be compensated for all losses by acts of 
the United States, including the loss of slaves. 

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand 
and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. 

Done at the City of Washington, this twenty-second 
day of September, in the year of our Lord one thou- 
sand eight hundred and sixty-two, and of the Inde- 
pendence of the United States the eighty-seventh. 
By the President: Abraham Lincoln. 

William H. Seward, Secretary of State. 



FINAL EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 

"Whereas, On the twenty-second day of September, 
in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred 
and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the 
President of the United States, containing, among 
other things, the following, to wit: — 

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our 
Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all 
persons held as slaves within any State or designated 
part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in 
rebellion against the United States, shall be then, 



fihai 

ltd and for 

mment of the United States, in :be mili- 

tary and naval authority the 
maintain the freedom of such pe~ 

- .:s to repress such persons, or any of them, in 
any efforts they may make f m. 

"That the Executive will, on the first day of Jan': 
aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the S*. 
parts of States, if any, in which ir- 
respectively shall then be in re1 
ted States; and the fact th: 
people thereof, shall on that day be in good : 
represented in the Cong- 
members ch : - 
ity of the qualified ~ 
participated, shall, in I ^ence c: 

ing testimony, be deemed 
such State and the people there : are not then in 
rebellion against the United Stat 

Now. therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of 
the United States, by virtue of the pc 
as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and 
:rd States, in time of actual arm 
against the authority and Government of the United 
States, and as a fit and necessary 
for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this fir 
January, in the year of our Lord one thousand e 
hundred and sixty-three, and in ace . my 

purpose so to do, | ~ed for the full 



176 FINAL EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 

period of one hundred days from the day first above- 
mentioned, order, designate, as the States and parts of 
States wherein the people thereof respectively are this 
day in rebellion against the United States, the follow- 
ing, to wit : Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, except the 
parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. 
John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, 
Terre Bonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and 
Orleans, including the city of New Orleans, Missis- 
sippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, 
North Carolina, and Virginia, except the forty-eight 
counties designated as West Virginia, and also the 
counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northampton, Eliza- 
beth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including 
the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth, and which 
excepted parts are, for the present, left precisely as if 
this proclamation were not issued. 

And by virtue of the power and for the purpose 
aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held 
as slaves within said designated States and parts of 
States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that 
the Executive Government of the United States, includ- 
ing the military and naval authorities thereof, will 
recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons. 

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to 
be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary 
self-defense, and I recommend to them that in all 
cases, when allowed, they labor faithfully for reason- 
able wages. 



ACCOUNT OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 177 

And I further declare and make known that such 
persons of suitable condition will be received into the 
armed service of the United States to garrison forts, 
positions, stations, and other places, and to man ves- 
sels of all sorts in said service. 

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of 
justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military 
necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of man- 
kind and the gracious favor of Almighty God. 

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my name 
and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. 

Done at the City of Washington, this first day of 
January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight 
hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence 
of the United States of America the eighty-seventh. 
By the President: Abraham Lincoln. 

W. H. Seward, Secretary of State. 



ACCOUNT OF THE EMANCIPATION PROC- 
LAMATION. 

{Related by the President to F. B. Carpenter, February 6, 1S64.) 

"It had got to be, "said Mr. Lincoln, "midsummer, 
1862. Things had gone on from bad to worse, until 
I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the 
plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had 
about played our last card, and must change our 
tactics, or lose the game. I now determined upon the 



178 ACCOUNT OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 

adoption of the emancipation policy; and without 
consultation with, or the knowledge of, the Cabinet, I 
prepared the original draft of the proclamation, and, 
after much anxious thought, called a Cabinet meeting 
upon the subject. This was the last of July or the 
first part of the month of August, 1862." [The exact 
date was July 22, 1862.] . . . "All were present 
excepting Mr. Blair, the Postmaster-General, who was 
absent at the opening of the discussion, but came in 
subsequently. I said to the Cabinet that I had 
resolved upon this step, and had not called them 
together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject- 
matter of a proclamation before them, suggestions as 
to which would be in order after they had heard it 
read. Mr. Lovejoy was in error when he informed 
you that it excited no comment excepting on the part 
of Secretary Seward. Various suggestions were 
offered. Secretary Chase wished the language 
stronger in reference to the arming of the blacks. 

"Mr. Blair, after he came in, deprecated the policy 
on the ground that it would cost the administration 
the fall elections. Nothing, however, was offered 
that I had not already fully anticipated and settled in 
my own mind, until Secretary Seward spoke. He 
said in substance, 'Mr. President, I approve of the 
proclamation, but I question the expediency of its 
issue at this juncture. The depression of the public 
mind, consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so 
great that I fear the effect of so important a step. It 



ACCOUNT OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 1 79 

may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted 
government, a cry for help; the Government stretch- 
ing forth its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia 
stretching forth her hands to the Government.' His 
idea," said the President, "was that it would be con- 
sidered our last shriek on the retreat. ' ' [This was his 
precise expression.] " 'Now,' continued Mr. Seward, 
'while I approve the measure, I suggest, sir, that you 
postpone its issue until you can give it to the country 
supported by military success, instead of issuing it, as 
would be the case now, upon the greatest disasters of 
the war.' " Mr. Lincoln continued: "The wisdom of 
the view of the Secretary of State struck me with 
great force. It was an aspect of the case that, in all 
my thought upon the subject, I had entirely over- 
looked. The result was that I put the draft of the 
proclamation aside, as you do your sketch for a pic- 
ture, waiting for a victory. 

"From time to time I added or changed a line, 
touching it up here and there, anxiously watching the 
progress of events. Well, the next news we had was 
of Pope's disaster at Bull Run. Things looked darker 
than ever. Finally came the week of the battle of 
Antietam. I determined to wait no longer. The 
news came, I think, on Wednesday, that the advan- 
tage was on our side. I was then staying at the Sol- 
diers' Home" [three miles out of Washington]. 
"Here I finished writing the second draft of the 
preliminary proclamation; came up on Saturday; 



l8o HYMN AFTER THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 

called the Cabinet together to hear it, and it was 
published on the following Monday." 



HYMN AFTER THE EMANCIPATION PROC- 
LAMATION. 

Giver of all that crowns our days, 
With Grateful hearts we sing thy praise ; 
Through deep and desert led by thee, 
Our promised land at last we see. 

Ruler of nations, judge our cause! 
If we have kept thy holy laws, 
The sons of Belial curse in vain 
The day that rends the captive's chain. 

Thou God of vengeance! Israel's Lord! 
Break in their grasp the shield and sword, 
And make thy righteous judgments known 
Till all thy foes are overthrown ! 

Then, Father, lay thy healing hand 
In mercy on our stricken land; 
Lead all its wanderers to the fold, 
And be their Shepherd as of old. 

So shall one Nation's song ascend 
To Thee, our Ruler, Father, Friend, 
While Heaven's wide arch resounds again 
With Peace on earth, good will to men! 

Oliver Wendell Holmes. 



THE DEATH OF SLAVERY, l8l 

THE DEATH OF SLAVERY. 

O thou, great Wrong, that, through the slow-paced 

years, 
Didst hold thy millions fettered, and didst wield 
The scourge that drove the laborer to the field, 
And turn a stony gaze on human tears, 

Thy cruel reign is o'er; 

Thy bondmen crouch no more 
In terror at the menace of thine eye ; 
For He who marks the bounds of guilty power, 
Long-suffering, hath heard the captive's cry, 
And touched his shackles at the appointed hour, 
And lo! they fall, and he whose limbs they galled 
Stands in his native manhood, disenthralled. 

A shout of joy from the redeemed is sent ; 
Ten thousand hamlets swell the hymn of thanks; 
Our rivers roll exulting, and their banks 
Send up hosannas to the firmament! 

Fields where the bondman's toil 

No more shall trench the soil, 
Seem now to bask in a serener day ; 
The meadow-birds sing sweeter, and the airs 
Of Heaven with more caressing softness play, 
Welcoming man to liberty like theirs. 
A glory clothes the land from sea to sea, 
For the great land and all its coasts are free. 

Copyrighted, 1883, by D. Appleton & Co. 



182 THE DEATH OF SLAVERY. 

Within that land wert thou enthroned of late, 
And they by whom the nation's laws were made, 
And they who filled its judgment seats obeyed 
Thy mandate, rigid as the will of Fate — 

Fierce men at thy right hand, 

With gesture of command, 
Gave forth the word that none might dare gainsay; 
And grave and reverend ones, who loved thee not, 
Shrank from thy presence, and in blank dismay 
Choked down, unuttered, the rebellious thought; 
While meaner cowards, mingling with thy train, 
Proved, from the book of God, thy right to reign. 

Great as thou wert, and feared from shore to shore, 
The wrath of Heaven o'ertook thee in thy pride; 
Thou sit'st a ghastly shadow; by thy side 
Thy once strong arms hang nerveless evermore. 

And they who quailed but now 

Before thy lowering brow 
Devote thy memory to scorn and shame, 
And scoff at the pale, powerless thing thou art. 
And they who ruled in thine imperial name, 
Subdued, and standing sullenly apart, 
Scowl at the hands that overthrew thy reign, 
And shattered at a blow the prisoner's chain. 

Well was thy doom deserved ; thou didst not spare 
Life's tenderest ties, but cruelly didst part 
Husband and wife, and from the mother's heart 



THE DEATH OF SLAVERY. 183 

Didst wrest her children, deaf to shriek and prayer; 

Thy inner lair became 

The haunt of guilty shame ; 
Thy lash dropped blood ; the murderer, at thy side, 
Showed his red hands, nor feared the vengeance due. 
Thou didst sow earth with crimes, and, far and wide, 
A harvest of uncounted miseries grew, 
Until the measure of thy sins at last 
Was full, and then the avenging bolt was cast! 

Go now, accursed of God, and take thy place 
With hateful memories of the elder time, 
With many a wasting plague, and nameless crime, 
And bloody war that thinned the human race ; 

With the Black Death,* whose way 

Through wailing cities lay, 
Worship of Moloch, tyrannies that built 
The Pyramids, and cruel creeds that taught 
To avenge a fancied guilt by deeper guilt — 
Death at the stake to those that held them not. 
Lo ! the foul phantoms, silent in the gloom 
Of the flown ages, part to yield thee room. 

I see the better years that hasten by 

Carry thee back into that shadowy past, 

Where, in the dusty spaces, void and vast, 

The graves of those whom thou hast murdered lie. 

The slave-pen, through whose door 

Thy victims pass no more, 
*A pestilence which swept over the Old World (1347-1350). 



LINCOLN S LETTERS. 



Is there, and there shall the grim block remain 
At which the slave was sold; while at thy feet 
Scourges and engines of restraint and pain 
Moulder and rust by thine eternal seat. 
There, mid the symbols that proclaim thy crimes, 
Dwell thou, a warning to the coming times. 

William Cullen Bryant. 



LINCOLN'S LETTERS. 
But Lincoln repelled no one whom he believed to 
speak to him in good faith and with patriotic purpose. 
No good advice would go unheeded. No candid 
criticism would offend him. No honest opposition, 
while it might pain him, would produce a lasting 
alienation of feeling between him and the opponent. 
It may truly be said that few men in power have ever 
been exposed to more daring attempts to direct their 
course, to severer censure of their acts, and to more 
cruel misrepresentation of their motives. And all this 
he met with that good-natured humor peculiarly his 
own, and with untiring effort to see the right and to 
impress it upon those who differed from him. The 
conversations he had and the correspondence he 
carried on upon matters of public interest, not only 
with men in official position, but with private citizens, 
were almost unceasing, and in a large number of 
public letters, written ostensibly to meetings, or com- 
mittees, or persons of importance, he addressed him- 
self directly to the popular mind. Most of these 



LINCOLN S LETTERS. 185 

letters stand among the finest monuments of our polit- 
ical literature. Thus he presented the singular 
spectacle of a President who, in the midst of a great 
civil war, with unprecedented duties weighing upon 
him, was constantly in person debating the great 
features of his policy with the people. 

While in this manner he exercised an ever-increas- 
ing influence upon the popular understanding, his 
sympathetic nature endeared him more and more to 
the popular heart. In vain did journals and speakers 
of the opposition represent him as a light-minded 
trifler, who amused himself with frivolous story-telling 
and coarse jokes, while the blood of the people was 
flowing in streams. The people knew that the man at 
the head of affairs, on whose haggard face the twinkle 
of humor so frequently changed into an expression of 
profoundest sadness, was more than any other deeply 
distressed by the suffering he witnessed; that he felt 
the pain of every wound that was inflicted on the 
battle field, and the anguish of every woman or child 
who had lost husband or father; that whenever he 
could he was eager to alleviate sorrow, and that his 
mercy was never implored in vain. They looked to 
him as one who was with them and of them in all their 
hopes and fears, their joys and sorrows, — who laughed 
with them and wept with them ; and as his heart was 
theirs, so their hearts turned to him. His popularity 
was far different from that of Washington, who was 
revered with awe, or that of Jackson, the unconquer- 



l86 LETTER TO J. C. CONKLING. 

able hero, for whom party enthusiasm never grew 
weary of shouting. To Abraham Lincoln the people 
became bound by a genuine sentimental attachment. 
It was not a matter of respect, or confidence, or party 
pride, for this feeling spread far beyond the boundary 
lines of his party ; it was an affair of the heart, inde- 
pendent of mere reasoning. When the soldiers in the 
field or their folks at home spoke of "Father Abra- 
ham," there was no cant in it. They felt that their 
President was really caring for them as a father 
would, and that they could go to him, every one of 
them, as they would go to a father, and talk to him 
of what troubled them, sure to find a willing ear and 
tender sympathy. Thus, their President, and his 
cause, and his endeavors, and his success gradually 
became to them almost matters of family concern. 
And this popularity carried him triumphantly through 
the presidential election of 1864, in spite of an opposi- 
tion within his own party which at first seemed very 
formidable. Carl Schurz. 

From "Abraham Lincoln." 



LETTER TO J. C. CONKLING. 

Executive Mansion, Washington, Aug. 26, 1863. 
Hon. James C. Conkling. 

My Dear Sir: — Your letter inviting me to attend a 
mass meeting of unconditional Union men, to be held 
at the capital of Illinois on the third day of September, 
has been received. It would be very agreeable to me 



LETTER TO J. C. CONKLING. 187 

thus to meet my old friends at my own home ; but I 
cannot just now be absent from this city so long as a 
visit there would require. The meeting is to be of all 
those who maintain unconditional devotion to the 
Union; and I am sure that my old political friends 
will thank me for tendering, as I do, the nation's 
gratitude to those other noble men whom no partisan 
malice or partisan hope can make false to the nation's 
life. There are those who are dissatisfied with me. 
To such I would say: You desire peace, and you 
blame me that we do not have it. But how can we 
attain it? There are but three conceivable ways: 
First, to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. This 
I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far 
we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is 
to give up the Union. I am against this. If you are, 
you should say so, plainly. If you are not for force, 
nor yet for dissolution, there only remains some 
imaginable compromise. I do not believe that any 
compromise embracing the maintenance of the Union 
is now possible. All that I learn leads to a directly 
opposite belief. The strength of the rebellion is its 
military — its army. That army dominates all the 
country and all the people within its range. Any 
offer of any terms made by any man or men within 
that range in opposition to that army, is simply noth- 
ing for the present, because such man or men have no 
power whatever to enforce their side of a compromise, 
if one were made with them. To illustrate : Suppose 



l88 LETTER TO J. C. CONKLING. 

refugees from the South and peace men of the North 
get together in convention, and frame and proclaim a 
compromise embracing the restoration of the Union. 
In what way can that compromise be used to keep Gen- 
eral Lee's army out of Pennsylvania? General Meade's 
army can keep Lee's army out of Pennsylvania, and I 
think can ultimately drive it out of existence. But no 
paper compromise to which the controllers of General 
Lee's army are not agreed, can at all affect that army. 
In an effort at such compromise we would waste time, 
which the enemy would improve to our disadvantage, 
and that would be all. A compromise, to be effective, 
must be made either with those who control the rebel 
army, or with the people, first liberated from the 
domination of that army by the success of our army. 
Now, allow me to assure you that no word or intima- 
tion from the rebel army, or from any of the men 
controlling it, in relation to any peace compromises, 
has ever come to my knowledge or belief. All 
charges and intimations to the contrary are deceptive 
and groundless. And I promise you that if any such 
proposition shall hereafter come, it shall not be 
rejected and kept secret from you. I freely acknowl- 
edge myself to be the servant of the people, according 
to the bond of service, the United States Constitution ; 
and that, as such, I am responsible to them. But, to 
be plain. You are dissatisfied with me about the negro. 
Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between 
you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish 



LETTER TO J. C. CONKLING. 189 

that all men could be free, while you, I suppose, do 
not. Yet I have neither adopted nor proposed any 
measure which is not consistent with even your view, 
provided you are for the Union. I suggested c ompe n- 
sated__emancipation, to which you replied that you 
wished not to be taxed to buy negroes. But I have 
not asked you to be taxed to buy negroes, except in 
such way as to save you from greater taxation, to save 
the Union exclusively by other means. 

You dislike the Emancipation Proclamation, and 
perhaps would have it retracted. You say it is uncon- 
stitutional. I think differently. I think that the 
Constitution invests its Commander-in-Chief with the 
l aw of_wa r in the time of war. The most that can be 
said, if so much, is that the slaves are property. Is 
there, has there ever been, any question that by the 
law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may 
be taken when needed? And is it not needed when- 
ever taking it helps us or hurts the enemy? Armies, 
the world over, destroy enemies' property when 
they cannot use it; and even destroy their own to 
keep it from the enemy. Civilized belligerents do all 
in their power to help themselves or hurt the enemy, 
except a few things regarded as barbarous or cruel. 
Among the exceptions are the massacre of vanquished 
foes and non-combatants, male and female. But the 
proclamation, as law, is valid or is not valid. If it is 
not valid it needs no retraction. If it is valid it can- 
not be retracted, any more than the dead can be 



190 LETTER TO J. C. CONKLING. 

brought to life. Some of you profess to think that its 
retraction would operate favorably for the Union. 
Why better after the retraction than before the issue? 
There was more than a year and a half of trial to sup- 
press the rebellion before the proclamation was issued, 
the last one hundred days of which passed under an 
explicit notice that it was coming unless averted by 
those in revolt returning to their allegiance. The 
war has certainly progressed as favorably for us since 
the issue of the proclamation as before. I know as 
fully as one can know the opinions of others, that 
some of the commanders of our armies in the field, 
who have given us our most important victories, 
believe the emancipation policy and the aid of colored 
troops constitute the heaviest blows yet dealt to the 
rebellion, and that at least one of those important suc- 
cesses could not have been achieved when it was but 
for the aid of black soldiers. Among the com- 
manders holding these views are some who have 
never had any affinity with what is called abolitionism 
or with "Republican party politics," but who hold 
them purely as military opinions. I submit their 
opinions as being entitled to some weight against the 
objections often urged that emancipation and arming 
the blacks are unwise as military measures, and were 
not adopted as such in good faith. You say that you 
will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem to 
be willing to fight for you — but no matter. Fight 
you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued 



LETTER TO J. C. CONKLING. 191 

the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the 
Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all 
resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to con- 
tinue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to 
declare that you will not fight to free negroes. I 
thought that, in your struggle for the Union, to what- 
ever extent the negroes should cease helping the 
enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his 
resistance to you. Do you think differently? I 
thought that whatever negroes can be got to do as 
soldiers leaves just so much less for white soldiers to 
do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to 
you? But negroes, like other people, act upon 
motives. Why should they do anything for us if we 
will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for 
us they must be prompted by the strongest motive, 
even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being 
made, must be kept. The signs look better. The 
Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. 
Thanks to the great Northwest for it. Nor yet wholly 
to them. Three hundred miles up they met New 
England, Empire, Keystone, and Jersey, hewing their 
way right and left. The Sunny South, too, in more 
colors than one, also lent a hand. On the spot, their 
part of the history was jotted down in black and 
white. The job was a great national one, and let 
none be banned who bore an honorable part in it ; and 
while those who have cleared the great river may well 
be proud, even that is not all. It is hard to say that 



192 LETTER TO J. C. CONKLING. 

anything- has been more bravely and better done than 
at Antietam, Murfreesboro', Gettysburg, and on many 
fields of less note. Nor must Uncle Sam's web feet be 
forgotten. At all the waters' margins they have been 
present: not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and 
the rapid river, but also up the narrow, muddy bayou ; 
and wherever the ground was a little damp, they 
have been and made their tracks. Thanks to all. 
For the great Republic — for the principles by which it 
lives and keeps alive — for man's vast future — thanks 
to all. Peace does not appear so far distant as it did. 
I hope it will come soon, and come to stay: and so 
come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. 
It will then have been proved that among freemen 
there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to 
the bullet, and that they who take such appeal are 
sure to lose their case and pay the cost. And then 
there will be some black men who can remember that, 
with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady 
eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped man- 
kind on to this great consummation ; while I fear that 
there will be some white men unable to forget that 
with malignant heart and deceitful speech they have 
striven to hinder it. Still, let us not be over sanguine 
of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. 
Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting 
that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the 
rightful result. Yours very truly, 

Abraham Lincoln. 



LETTER TO A. G, HODGES. 193 



LETTER TO A. G. HODGES. 

Executive Mansion, Washington, April 4, 1864. 
A. G. Hodges, Esq., Frankfort, Ky. 

My Dear Sir: — You ask me to put in writing the 
substance of what I verbally said the other day in 
your presence, to Governor Bramlette and Senator 
Dixon. It was about as follows: 

"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not 
wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when 
I did not so think and feel, and yet I have never 
understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an 
unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment 
and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, 
to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and 
defend the Constitution of the United States. I could 
not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was 
it my view that I might take an oath to get power, 
and break the oath in using the power. I understood, 
too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath 
even forbade me to practically indulge my primary 
abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. 
I had publicly declared this many times, and in many 
ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no 
official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment 
and feeling on slavery. 

"I did understand, however, that my oath to pre- 
serve the Constitution to the best of my ability 



194 LETTER TO A. G. HODGES. 

imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every 
indispensable means, that Government — that Nation — 
of which that Constitution was the organic law. Was it 
possible to lose the Nation and yet preserve the Con- 
stitution? 

"By general law, life and limb must be protected, 
yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; 
but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt 
that measures otherwise unconstitutional might 
become lawful by becoming indispensable to the 
preservation of the Constitution through the preser- 
vation of the Nation. Right or wrong, I assumed 
this ground, and now avow it. I could not feel that, 
to the best of my ability, I had even tried to pre- 
serve the Constitution if, to save slavery or any 
minor matter, I should permit the wreck of Govern- 
ment, Country, and Constitution, all together. 
When, early in the war, General Fremont attempted 
military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not 
then think it an indispensable necessity. When, a 
little later, General Cameron, then Secretary of 
War, suggested the arming of the blacks, I objected 
because I did not yet think it an indispensable neces- 
sity. When, still later, General Hunter attempted 
military emancipation, I again forbade it, because I 
did not yet think the indispensable necessity had 
come. 

"When, in March and May and July, 1862, I made 
earnest and successive appeals to the Border States 



LETTER TO A. G. HODGES. 195 

to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the 
indispensable necessity for military emancipation and 
arming the blacks would come unless averted by that 
measure. They declined the proposition, and I was, 
in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of 
either surrendering the Union, and with it the Con- 
stitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored 
element. I chose the latter. In choosing it, I hoped 
for greater gain than loss; but of this I was not 
entirely confident. More than a year of trial now 
shows no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in 
our home popular sentiment, none in our white mili- 
tary force — no loss by it anyhow or anywhere. On 
the contrary, it shows a gain of quite a hundred and 
thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and laborers./ 
These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there 
can be no caviling. We have the men ; and we could 
not have had them without the measure. 

"And now let any Union man who complains of the 
measure test himself by writing down in one line that 
he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms ; and 
in the next, that he is for taking these one hundred and 
thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing 
them where they would be but for the measure he 
condemns. If he cannot face his cause so stated, it is 
only because he cannot face the truth." 

I add a word which was not in the verbal conversa- 
tion. In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to 
my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled 



I96 AN ENGLISH ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 

events, but confess plainly that events have controlled 
me. Now, at the end of three years' struggle, the 
Nation's condition is not what either party, or any 
man devised or expected. God alone can claim it. 
Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills 
the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we 
of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay 
fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial his- 
tory will find therein new cause to attest and revere 
the justice and goodness of God. Yours truly, 

A. Lincoln. 



AN ENGLISH ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 

It is one of the greatest of Lincoln's claims to 
admiration that, though he sympathized with the 
fervor and enthusiasm of his countrymen, he was not 
carried away by it. He was one of those rare men 
who can at once be zealous and moderate, who are 
kindled by great ideas, and who yet retain complete 
control of the critical faculty. And more than this, 
Lincoln was a man who could be reserved without the 
chill of reserve. Again, he could make allowance for 
demerits in a principle or a human instrument with- 
out ever falling into the purblindness of cynicism. 
He often acted in his dealings with men much as a 
professed cynic might have acted ; but his conduct was 
due, not to any disbelief in virtue, but to a wide toler- 



AN ENGLISH ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 197 

ance and a clear knowledge of human nature. He 
saw things as a disillusionized man sees them, and 
yet in the bad sense he never suffered any disillusion- 
ment. For suffusing and combining his other quali- 
ties was a serenity of mind which affected the whole 
man. He viewed the world too much as a whole to 
be greatly troubled or perplexed over its accidents. 
To this serenity of mind was clue an almost total 
absence of indignation in the ordinary sense. Gen- 
erals might half-ruin the cause for the sake of some 
trumpery quarrel, or in order to gain some petty per- 
sonal advantage ; office-seekers might worry at the very 
crisis of the nation's fate; but none of the pettinesses, 
the spites, or the follies could rouse in Lincoln the 
impatience or the indignation that would have been 
wakened in ordinary men. Pity, and nothing else, 
was the feeling such exhibitions occasioned him. 
Lincoln seems to have felt the excuse that tempers 
the guilt of every mortal transgression. His large- 
ness and tenderness of nature made him at heart a 
universal apologist. He was, of course, too practical 
and too great a statesman to let this sensibility to the 
excuses that can be made for human conduct induce 
him to allow misdeeds to go unpunished or uncor- 
rected. He acted as firmly and as severely as if he 
had experienced the most burning indignation ; but 
the moment we come to Lincoln's real feelings, we see 
that he was never incensed, and that, even in its most 
legitimate form, the desire for retribution is absent 



198 AN ENGLISH ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 

from his mind. "To know all is to forgive all," was 
the secret of his attitude towards human affairs. 
That is not the highest wisdom; but it errs on the 
right, and also on the rare, side. 

So much for the intellectual side of Lincoln's 
nature. Behind it was a personality of singular 
charm. Tenderness and humor were its main char- 
acteristics. As he rode through a forest in spring- 
time, he would keep on dismounting to put back the 
young birds that had fallen from their nests. There 
was not a situation in life which could not afford him 
the subject for a kindly smile. It needed a character 
so full of gentleness and good temper to sustain the 
intolerable weight of responsibility which the war 
threw upon the shoulders of the President: Most 
men would have been crushed by the burden. His 
serenity of temper saved Lincoln. Except when the 
miserable necessity of having to sign the order for a 
military execution took away his sleep, he carried on 
his work without any visible sign of over-strain. Not 
the least of Lincoln's achievements is to be found in 
the fact that though for four years he wielded a 
power and a personal authority greater than that 
exercised by any monarch on earth, he never gave 
satirist or caricaturist the slightest real ground for 
declaring that his sudden rise to world-wide fame 
had turned the head of the backwoodsman. Under 
the circumstances there would have been every excuse 
for Lincoln had he assumed to his subordinates some- 



AN ENGLISH ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 199 

what of the bearing of the autocrat he was. It is a 
sign of the absolute sincerity and good sense of the 
President that he was under no sort of a temptation 
to do so. Lincoln was before all things a gentleman, 
and the good taste inseparable from that character 
made it impossible for him to be spoiled by power and 
position. This grace and strength of character is 
never better shown than in the letters to his generals, 
victorious or defeated. When they were beaten, he 
was anxious to share the blame ; when victorious he 
was instant to deny by anticipation any rumor that he 
had inspired the strategy of the campaign. If a 
general had to be reprimanded he did it as only the 
most perfect of gentlemen could do it. He could 
convey the severest censure without inflicting any 
wound that would not heal, and this not by using 
roundabout expressions, but in the plainest language. 
"He writes me like a father, " were the heart-felt words 
of a commander who had been reproved by the Presi- 
dent. Throughout these communications, the manner 
in which he not only conceals but altogether sinks all 
sense that the men to whom they are addressed 
were, in effect, his subordinates, is worthy of special 
note. "A breath could make them, as a breath had 
made," and yet Lincoln writes as if his generals were 
absolutely independent. 

We have said something of Lincoln as a man and 
as the leader of a great cause. We desire now to 
dwell upon a point which is often neglected in con- 



200 AN ENGLISH ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 

sidering the career of the hero of the Union, but 
which, from the point of view of letters, is of absorb- 
ing interest. No criticism of Mr. Lincoln can be in 
any sense adequate which does not deal with his 
astonishing power over words. It is not too much to 
say of him that he is among the greatest masters of 
prose ever produced by the English race. Self-edu- 
cated, or rather not educated at all in the ordinary 
sense, as he was, he contrived to obtain an insight 
and power in the handling of the mechanism of letters 
such as has been given to few men in his, or, indeed, 
in any age. That the gift of oratory should be a 
natural gift, is understandable enough, for the 
methods of the orator, like those of the poet, are 
primarily sensuous, and may well be instinctive. 
Mr. Lincoln's achievement seems to show that no less 
is the writing of prose an endowment of Nature. Mr. 
Lincoln did not get his ability to handle prose through 
his gift of speech. That these are separate, though 
coordinate, faculties is a matter beyond dispute, for 
many of the great orators of the world hare proved 
themselves exceedingly inefficient in the matter of 
deliberate composition. Mr. Lincoln enjoyed both 
gifts. His letters, dispatches, memoranda, and 
written addresses are even better than his speeches ; 
and in speaking thus of Mr. Lincoln's prose, we are 
not thinking merely of certain pieces of inspired 
rhetoric. We do not praise his work because, like 
Mr. Bright, he could exercise his power of coining 



AN ENGLISH ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN. 201 

illuminating- phrases as effectively upon paper as on 
the platform. It is in his conduct of the pedestrian 
portions of composition that Mr. Lincoln's genius for 
prose style is exhibited. Mr. Blight's writing cannot 
claim to answer the description which Hazlitt has 
given of the successful prose-writer's performance. 
Mr. Lincoln's can. What Hazlitt says is complete 
and perfect in definition. He tells us that the prose- 
writer so uses his pen "that he loses no particle of 
the exact characteristic extreme impression of the 
thing he writes about" ; and with equal significance 
he points out that "the prose- writer is master of his 
materials," as "the poet is the slave of his style." If 
these words convey a true definition, then Mr. Lin- 
coln is a master of prose. Whatever the subject he 
has in hand, whether it be bold or impassioned, 
business-like or pathetic, we feel that we "lose no 
particle of the exact characteristic extreme impres- 
sion" of the thing written about. We have it all, and 
not merely a part. Every line shows that the writer 
is master of his materials ; that he guides the words, 
never the words him. This is, indeed, the predomi- 
nant note throughout all Mr. Lincoln's work. Wc 
feel that he is like the engineer who controls some 
mighty reservoir. As he desires, he opens the various 
sluice-gates, but for no instant is the water not under 
his entire control. We are sensible in reading Mr. 
Lincoln's writings, that an immense force is gathered 
up behind him, and that in each jet that flows every 



202 LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLELLAN. 

drop is meant. Some writers only leak; others half 
flow through determined channels, half leak away 
their words like a broken lock when it is emptying. 
The greatest, like Mr. Lincoln, send out none but 
clear-shaped streams. 

— London Spectator, April 25 and May 5, 1891. 



LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLELLAN. 

Washington, April 9, 1862. 
Major-General McClellan. 

My Dear Sir: — Your dispatches, complaining that 
you are not properly sustained, while they do not 
offend me, do pain me very much. 

Blenker's division was withdrawn from you before 
you left here, and you know the pressure under which 
I did it, and, as I thought, acquiesced in it — certainly 
not without reluctance. 

After you left I ascertained that less than twenty 
thousand unorganized men, without a single field 
battery, were all you designed to be left for the 
defense of Washington and Manassas Junction, and 
part of this even was to go to General Hooker's old 
position; General Banks' corps, once designated for 
Manassas Junction, was divided and tied up on the 



Note. — General McClellan was assigned to the command of the 
Army of the Potomac July 25, 1861; was commander-in-chief of 
all the armies of the U. S. Nov. 1, 1861-March 11, 1862. Con- 
ducted the Peninsular campaign March to July, 1862, and was 
superseded by Burnside Nov. 7,1862. 



LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLELLAN. 203 

line of Winchester and Strasburgh, and conld not 
leave it without again exposing the Upper Potomac 
and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. This presented 
— or would present, when McDowell and Sumner 
should be gone — a great temptation to the enemy to 
turn back from the Rappahannock and sack Washing- 
ton. My explicit order that Washington should, by 
the judgment of all the commanders of corps, be left 
entirely secure, had been neglected. It was precisely 
this that drove me to detain McDowell. 

I do not forget that I was satisfied with your 
arrangement to leave Banks at Manassas Junction; 
but when that arrangement was broken up and noth- 
ing was substituted for it, of course I was not satis- 
fied, but I was constrained to substitute something 
for it myself. 

And now allow me to ask, do you really think I 
should permit the line from Richmond via Manassas 
Junction to this city to be entirely open, except what 
resistance could be presented by less than twenty 
thousand unorganized troops? This is a question 
which the country will not allow me to evade. 

There is a curious mystery about the number of 
troops now with you. When I telegraphed you on the 
6th, saying you had over a hundred thousand with 
you, I had just obtained from the Secretary of War a 
statement, taken as he said from your own returns, 
making one hundred and eight thousand then with 
you and en route to you. You now say you will have 



204 LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLELLAN. 

but eighty-five thousand when all en route to you shall 
have reached you. How can this discrepancy of twenty- 
three thousand be accounted for? 

As to General Wool's command, I understand it is 
doing for you precisely what a like number of your 
own would have to do if that command was away. I 
suppose the whole force which has gone forward to 
you is with you by this time ; and if so, I think it is 
the precise time for you to strike a blow. By delay 
the enemy will relatively gain upon you — that is, he 
will gain faster by fortifications and reinforcement 
than you can by reinforcements alone. 

And once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to 
you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help 
this. You will do me the justice to remember I 
always insisted that going down the bay in search of a 
field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only 
shifting and not surmounting a difficulty; that we 
would find the same enemy and the same or equal 
intrenchments at either place. The country will not 
fail to note — is noting now — that the present hesita- 
tion to move upon an intrenched enemy is but the 
story of Manassas repeated. 

I beg to assure you that I have never written you 
or spoken to you in greater kindness of feeling than 
now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far 
as in my most anxious judgment I consistently can ; 
but you must act. Yours very truly, 

A. Lincoln. 



LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLELLAN. 205 



LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLELLAN. 

Fort Monroe, Va., May 9, 1862. 
Major-General McClellan. 

My Dear Sir: — I have just assisted the Secretary of 
War in framing part of a dispatch to you relating to 
army corps, which dispatch, of course, will have 
reached you long before this will. I wish to say 
a few words to you privately on this subject. I 
ordered the army corps organization not only on 
the unanimous opinion of the twelve generals 
whom you had selected and assigned as generals 
of division, but also on the unanimous opinion of 
every military man I could get an opinion from — and 
every modern military book, — yourself only excepted. 
Of course I did not on my own judgment pretend to 
understand the subject. I now think it indispensable 
for you to know how your struggle against it is 
received in quarters which we cannot entirely disre- 
gard. It is looked upon as merely an effort to pamper 
one or two pets, and to persecute and degrade their 
supposed rivals. I have had no word from Sumner, 
Heintzelman, or Keyes. The commanders of these 
corps are of course the three highest officers with 
you, but I am constantly told that you have no consul- 
tation or communication with them; that you consult 
and communicate with nobody but Gen. Fitz-John 
Porter and perhaps General Franklin. I do not say 



206 LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLELLAN. 

these complaints are true or just; but at all events it 
is proper you should know of their existence. Do the 
commanders of corps disobey your orders in anything? 

When you relieved General Hamilton of his com- 
mand the other day, you thereby lost the confidence 
of at least one of your best friends in the Senate. And 
here let me say, not as applicable to you personally, 
that senators and representatives speak of me in their 
places as they please without question, and that offi- 
cers of the army must cease addressing insulting let- 
ters to them for taking no greater liberty with them. 

But to return. Are you strong enough, even with 
my help, to set your foot upon the necks of Sumner, 
Heintzelman, and Keyes all at once? This is a prac- 
tical and very serious question for you. 

The success of your army and the cause of the 
country are the same, and of course I only desire the 
good of the cause. Yours truly, 

A. Lincoln. 



LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLELLAN. 

Executive Mansion, 
Washington, D. C, Oct. 13, 1862. 
Major-General McClellan. 

My Dear Sir: — You remember my speaking to you 
of what I called your over-cautiousness. Are you not 
over-cautious when you assume that you cannot do 
what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not 



LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLELLAN. 207 

claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon 
the claim? 

As I understand, you telegraphed General Hal- 
leck that you cannot subsist your army at Win- 
chester unless the railroad from Harper's Ferry 
to that point be put in working order. But the 
enemy does now subsist his army at Winchester, at 
a distance nearly twice as great from railroad trans- 
portation as you would have to do, without the rail- 
road last named. He now wagons from Culpeper 
Court House, which is just about twice as far as you 
would have to do from Harper's Ferry. He is 
certainly not more than half as well provided with 
wagons as you are. I certainly should be pleased for 
you to have the advantage of the railroad from 
Harper's Ferry to Winchester; but it wastes all the 
remainder of autumn to give it to you, and, in fact, 
ignores the question of time, which cannot and must 
not be ignored. 

Again, one of the standard maxims of war, as 
you know, is, "to operate upon the enemy's com- 
munications as much as possible without exposing 
your own." You seem to act as if this applies 
against you, but cannot apply in your favor. Change 
positions with the enemy, and think you not he 
would break your communication with Richmond 
within the next twenty-four hours? You dread his 
going into Pennsylvania; but, if he does so in full 
force, he gives up his communications to you abso- 



208 LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLELLAN. 

lutely, and you have nothing to do but to follow and 
ruin him. If he does so with less than full force, fall 
upon and beat what is left behind all the easier. 

Exclusive of the water-line, you are now nearer Rich- 
mond than the enemy is by the route that you can 
and he must take. Why can you not reach there 
before him, unless you admit that he is more than 
your equal on a march? His route is the arc of a 
circle, while yours is the chord. The roads are as 
good on yours as on his. 

You know I desired, but did not order, you 
to cross the Potomac below, instead of above, 
the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge. My idea was 
that this would at once menace the enemy's com- 
munications, which I would seize if he would permit. 
If he should move northward, I would follow him 
closely, holding his communications. If he should 
prevent our seizing his communications and move 
toward Richmond, I would press closely to him, fight 
him if a favorable opportunity should present, and 
at least try to beat him to Richmond on the inside 
track. I say "try"; if we never try we shall never 
succeed. If he makes a stand at Winchester, mov- 
ing neither north nor south, I would fight him 
there, on the idea that, if we cannot beat him when 
he bears the wastage of coming to us, we never can 
when we bear the wastage of going to him. This 
proposition is a simple truth, and is too important 
to be lost sight of for a moment. In coming to us 



LETTER TO GEN. G. B. McCLKLLAN. 209 

he tenders us an advantage which we should not 
waive. We should not so operate as to merely drive 
him away. As we must beat him somewhere or fail 
finally, we can do it, if at all, easier near to us than 
far away. If we cannot beat the enemy where he 
now is, we never can, he again being within the 
intrenchments of Richmond. Recurring to the idea of 
going to Richmond on the inside track, the facility of 
supplying from the side away from the enemy is re- 
markable; as it were, by the different spokes of a 
wheel extending from the hub toward the rim; and 
this whether you move directly by the chord or on the 
inside arc, hugging the Blue Ridge more closely. The 
chord-line, as you see, carries you by Aldie, Hay Mar- 
ket, and Fredericksburg, and you see how turnpikes, 
railroads, and finally the Potomac, by Aquia Creek, 
meet you at all points from Washington. The same, 
only the lines lengthened a little, if you press closer to 
the Blue Ridge part of the way. 

The gaps through the Blue Ridge I understand to 
be about the following distances from Harper's 
Ferry, to wit: Vestal's, 5 miles; Gregory's, 13; 
Snicker's, 18; Ashby's, 28; Manassas, 38; Chester, 
45; and Thornton's, 53. I should think it preferable 
to take the route nearest the enemy, disabling him to 
make an important move without your knowledge, 
and compelling him to keep his forces together for 
dread of you. The gaps would enable you to attack 
if you should wish. For a great part of the way you 









A. LlSODUL 



LETTER TO GENERAL SCHOFIELD, 

{Rel :ke removal of General Curtis. ) 

Executive V- "" May :-. 1863. 

->. J. M. Sce:?:il: 
Dear Sir: — ! \ amoved Genera] Curtis £.ni 

pief 7:- :: '.':.- ::nmi.r.i ::' :be Ie_ir*~e-: ::' 
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m e :: state :: yoo why I i-i it I did not remove 

;ral Gratis iecanse of my foil ::>nviction that he 
had lone r 1 ng by commission or omission. I did it 
--. :f a conviction in my mmd that the L'nion 
~er ;:' Missouri. ::us:i:u:iu:: ~ ber uu::tf. £ vast 
rirj ::' bbe re:rlt. fi"r eu:eref in:: h. pestilent. 
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rerbsus n:t ::' :b:;:e :-::: tbe beaf :: ne :s::;:n, 
and Sovernar Gamble that of the other. After 



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212 LETTER TO GEN. U. S. GRANT. 

across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, 
and thus go below; and I never had any faith, ex- 
cept a general hope that you knew better than I, that 
the Yazoo Pass expedition and the like could succeed. 
When you got below and took Port Gibson, Grand 
Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down 
the river and join General Banks, and when you 
turned northward, east of the Big Black, I feared it 
was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal 
acknowledgment that you were right and I was wrong. 

Yours truly, 

A. Lincoln. 



LETTER TO GEN. U. S. GRANT. 

Executive Mansion, Washington, April 30, 1864. 

Lieutenant -General Grant: — Not expecting to 
see you before the spring campaign opens, I wish 
to express in this way my entire satisfaction with 
what you have done up to this time, so far as I 
understand it. The particulars of your plans I 
neither know nor seek to know. You are vigilant 
and self-reliant; and, pleased with this, I wish 
not to obtrude any restraints or constraints upon 
you. While I am very anxious that any great dis- 



Note. — General Grant was made commander of the district of 
West Tennessee March, 1862; of the Dept. of the Tennessee in 
Oct., 1862; of the Division of the Mississippi Oct. , 1863; Lieutenant- 
General, March 2, 1864, and commander of all the American 
Armies, March 12, 1864. 



ORDER FOR SABBATH OBSERVANCE. 213 

aster or capture of our men in great number shall 
be avoided, I know these points are less likely to 
escape your attention than they would be mine. 

If there be anything wanting which is in my power 
to give, do not fail to let me know it. And now, with 
a brave army and a just cause, may God sustain you. 
Yours very truly, 



A. .Ll.-NCOLN. 



ORDER FOR SABBATH OBSERVANCE. 

Executive Mansion, Washington, Nov. 16, 1862. 

The President, commander-in-chief of the army 
and navy, desires and enjoins the orderly observance 
of the Sabbath by the officers and men in the mil- 
itary and naval service. The importance for man and 
beast of the prescribed weekly rest, the sacred rights 
of Christian soldiers and sailors, a becoming deference 
to the best sentiment of a Christian people, and a due 
regard for the Divine will, demand that Sunday labor 
in the army and navy be reduced to the measure of 
strict necessity. 

The discipline and character of the national forces 
should not suffer, nor the cause they defend be im- 
periled, by the profanation of the day or name of the 
Most High. "At this time of public distress" (adopt- 
ing the words of Washington in 1776,) "men may find 
enough to do in the service of God and their country 
without abandoning themselves to vice and immor- 
ality." 



214 0UR GOOD PRESIDENT. 

The first general order issued by the Father of his 
Country after the Declaration of Independence indi- 
cates the spirit in which our institutions were founded 
and should ever be defended : 

"The general hopes and trusts that every officer and man will 
endeavor to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier defending 
the dearest rights and liberties of his country." 

Abraham Lincoln. 



OUR GOOD PRESIDENT. 

Our sun hath gone down at the noon-day, 

The heavens are black ; 
And over the morning, the shadows 

Of night-time are back. 

Stop the proud boasting mouth of the cannon ; 

Hush the mirth and the shout ; — 
God is God ! and the ways of Jehovah 

Are past finding out. 

Lo ! the beautiful feet on the mountains, 

That yesterday stood, 
The white feet that came with glad tidings 

Are dabbled in blood. 

The Nation that firmly was settling 

The crown on her head, 
Sits like Rizpah, in sackcloth and ashes, 

And watches her dead. 



OUR GOOD PRESIDENT. 215 

Who is dead? who, unmoved by our wailing, 

Is lying so low? 
O my Land, stricken dumb in your anguish, 

Do you feel, do you know, 

That the hand which reached out of the darkness 

Hath taken the whole ; 
Yea, the arm and the head of the people, — 

The heart and the soul? 

And that heart, o'er whose dread awful silence 

A nation has wept ; 
Was the truest, and gentlest, and sweetest, 

A man ever kept. 

Why, he heard from the dungeons, the rice-fields, 

The dark holds of ships, 
Every faint, feeble cry which oppression 

Smothered down on men's lips. 

In her furnace, the centuries had welded 

Their fetter and chain ; 
And like withes, in the hands of his purpose, 

He snapped them in twain. 

Who can be what he was to the people, — 

What he was to the State? 
Shall the ages bring to us another 

As good and as great? 

Our hearts with their anguish are broken, 
Our wet eyes are dim ; 



2l6 TRIBUTE TO PRESIDENT LINCOLN. 

For us is the loss and the sorrow, 
The triumph for him ! 

For, ere this, face to face with his Father 

Our martyr hath stood ; 
Giving into his hand a white record, 

With its great seal of blood ! 



Phcebe Cary. 



TRIBUTE TO PRESIDENT LINCOLN. 

In the hour of his great work done, President Lincoln 
has fallen. Not, indeed, in the flush of triumph, for no 
thought of triumph was in that honest and humble 
heart, nor in the intoxication of applause, for the 
fruits of victory were not yet gathered in his hand, 
was the Chief of the American people, the foremost 
man in the great Christian revolution of our age, 
struck down. But his task was, nevertheless, accom- 
plished, and the battle of his life was won. So he 
passes away from the heat and the toil that still have 
to be endured, full of the honor that belongs to one 
who has nobly done his part, and carrying in his last 
thoughts the sense of deep, steadfast thankfulness 
that he now could see the assured coming of that end 
for which he had so long striven in faith and hope. 
. . In all time to come, not among Americans 
only, but among all who think of manhood as more 
than rank, and set worth above display, the name of 



TRIBUTE TO PRESIDENT LINCOLN. 217 

Abraham Lincoln will be held in reverence. Rising 
from among the poorest of the people, winning his 
slow way upward by sheer hard work, preserving in 
every successive stage a character unspotted and a 
name untainted, securing a wider respect as he 
became better known, never pretending to more 
than he was, nor being less than he professed himself, 
he was at length, for very singleness of heart and 
uprightness of conduct, because all felt that they 
could trust him utterly, and would desire to be guided 
by his firmness, courage, and sense, placed in the 
chair of President at the turning-point of his nation's 
history. A life so true, rewarded by a dignity so 
majestic, was defense enough against the petty shafts 
of malice which party spirit, violent enough to light 
a civil war, aimed against him. The lowly callings 
he had first pursued, became his titles to greater 
respect among those whose respect was worth having ; 
the little external rusticities only showed more 
brightly, as the rough matrix the golden ore, the 
true dignity of his nature. Never was any one, set 
in such high place, and surrounded with so many 
motives of furious detraction, so little impeached of 
aught blameworthy. The bitterest enemy could find 
no more to lay to his charge than that his language 
was sometimes too homely for a supersensitive 
taste, or that he conveyed in a jesting phrase what 
they deemed more suited for a statelier style. But 
against these specks, what thorough nobility have we 



2l8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

not to set? A purity of thought, word, and deed 
never challenged, a disinterestedness never suspected, 
an honesty of purpose never impugned, a gentleness 
and tenderness that never made a private enemy or 
alienated a friend — these are indeed qualities which 
may well make a nation mourn. But he had intellect 
as well as goodness. Cautiously conservative, fear- 
ing to pass the limits of established systems, seeking 
the needful amendments rather from growth than 
alteration, he proved himself in the crisis the very 
man best suited for his post. . . . 

— London Daily News, April 27, 1S65. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

Oh, slow to smite and swift to spare, 
Gentle and merciful and just! 

Who, in the fear of God, didst bear 
The sword of power, a nation's trust! 

In sorrow by thy bier we stand, 
Amid the awe that hushes all, 

And speak the anguish of a land 
That shook with horror at thy fall. 

Thy task is done; the bond are free: 
We bear thee to an honored grave, 

Whose proudest monument shall be 
The broken fetters of the slave. 

Copyrighted, 1883, by D. Appleton & Co. 



LETTER TO THE WORKINGMEN OF MANCHESTER. 219 

Pure was thy life ; its bloody close 

Hath placed thee with the sons of light, 

Among the noble host of those 

Who perished in the cause of Right. 

William Cullen Bryant. 



LETTER TO THE WORKINGMEN OF MAN- 
CHESTER, ENGLAND. 

Executive Mansion, Washington, Jan. 19, 1863. 

To the Workingmen of Manchester: — I have the 
honor to acknowledge the receipt of the address and 
resolutions which you sent me on the eve of the new 
year. 

When I came, on the 4th of March, 1861, through a 
free and constitutional election to preside in the 
Government of the United States, the country was 
found at the verge of civil war. Whatever might 
have been the cause, or whosesoever the fault, one 
duty, paramount to all others, was before me, namely, 
to maintain and preserve at once the Constitution and 
the integrity of the Federal Republic. A conscien- 
tious purpose to perform this duty is the key to all 
the measures of administration which have been and 
to all which will hereafter be pursued. Under our 
frame of government and my official oath, I could not 
depart from this purpose if I would. It is not always 
in the power of governments to enlarge or restrict 



220 LETTER TO THE WORKINGMEN OF MANCHESTER. 

the scope of moral results which follow the policies 
that they ma}' deem it necessary for the public safety 
from time to time to adopt. 

I have understood well that the duty of self-preser- 
vation rests solely with the American people ; but I 
have at the same time been aware that the favor or 
disfavor of foreign nations might have a material 
influence in enlarging and prolonging the struggle with 
disloyal men in which the country is engaged. A 
fair examination of history has served to authorize a 
belief that the past actions and influences of the 
United States were generally regarded as having been 
beneficial toward mankind. I have, therefore, reckoned 
upon the forbearance of nations. Circumstances — to 
some of which you kindly allude — induced me espe- 
cially to expect that if justice and good faith should be 
practised by the United States, they would encounter 
no hostile influence on the part of Great Britain. It 
is now a pleasant duty to acknowledge the demonstra- 
tion you have given of your desire that a spirit of 
peace and amity toward this country may prevail in 
the councils of your Queen, who is respected and 
esteemed in your own country only more than she 
is by the kindred nation which has its home on this 
side of the Atlantic. 

I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the 
workingmen at Manchester, and in all Europe, are 
called to endure in this crisis. It has been often and 
studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow 



LETTER TO THE WORKINGMEN OF MANCHESTER. 221 

this Government, which was built upon the foundation 
of human rights, and to substitute for it one which 
should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, 
was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through 
the action of our disloyal citizens, the workingmen of 
Europe have been subjected to severe trials for the 
purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. 
Under the circumstances, I cannot but regard your 
decisive utterances upon the question as an instance 
of sublime Christian heroism which has not been sur- 
passed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an 
energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent 
power of truth, and of the ultimate and universal 
triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom. I do not 
doubt that the sentiments you have expressed will be 
sustained by your great nation; and, on the other 
hand, I have no hesitation in assuring you that they 
will excite admiration, esteem, and the most reciprocal 
feelings of friendship among the American people. 
I hail this interchange of sentiment, therefore, as an 
augury that whatever else may happen, whatever 
misfortune may befall your country or my own, the 
peace and friendship which now exist between the 
two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make 

them, perpetual. 

Abraham Lincoln. 



222 PROCLAMATION FOR THANKSGIVING. 

Desirous of inaugurating the custom of setting apart 
each year a common day throughout the land for thanks- 
giving and prayer, Mr. Lincoln issued the following: 

PROCLAMATION FOR THANKSGIVING. 

The year that is drawing towards its close has been 
rilled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful 
skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly 
enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from 
which they come, others have been added, which are 
of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to 
penetrate and soften the heart which is habitually 
insensible to the ever watchful providence of 
Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of 
unequaled magnitude and severity, which has some- 
times seemed to foreign States to invite and provoke 
their aggressions, peace has been preserved with all 
nations, order has been maintained, the laws have 
been respected and obeyed, and harmony has pre- 
vailed everywhere, except in the theater of military 
conflict ; and that theater has been greatly contracted 
by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. 
The needful diversion of wealth and of strength 
from the fields of peaceful industry to the national 
defense has not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or 
the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our 
settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal 



PROCLAMATION FOR THANKSGIVING. 223 

as of the precious metals, have yielded even more 
abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily 
increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been 
made in the camp, the siege, and the battle-field, and 
the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of aug- 
mented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect a 
continuance of years with a large increase of free- 
dom. No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any 
mortal hand worked out these great things. They 
are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, 
while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath 
nevertheless remembered mercy. 

It hath seemed to me fit and proper that they 
should be solemnly and gratefully acknowledged 
as with one heart and voice by the whole American 
people. I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in 
every part of the United States, and also those who 
are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign 
lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of 
November next as a day of thanksgiving and prayer 
to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. 
And I recommend to them that, while offering up the 
ascriptions justly due to him for such singular deliver- 
ances and blessings, they do also, with humble 
penitence for our National perverseness and dis- 
obedience, commend to his tender care all those 
who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or 
sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are 
unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the 



224 DEDICATION OF THE GETTYSBURG CEMETERY. 

interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the 
wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as 
may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full 
enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union. 

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand 
and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. 

Done at the City of Washington, this the third day 
of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand 
eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence 
of the United States the eighty-eighth. 

By the President: Abraham Lincoln. 

William H. Seward, Secretary of State. 



ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE 
GETTYSBURG NATIONAL CEMETERY. 

{November ig, 1863.) 

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought 
forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in 
Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men 
are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great 
civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation 
so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 
We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We 
are met to dedicate a portion of that field as a final 
resting place of those who here gave their lives that 
that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and 
proper that we should do this. 

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot 



EXTRACT FROM 3 1 DE. : : 

e cannot hallow this ground. The I 
men, living and dead, who struggled . con- 

secrated it far above our power to add or 

'.i will little note, nor long remember, 
ere, but it can never fbrgel 
here. It is far as, the living, rather to be dedicated 
- .1; j fought 

here is Ear so nobly advanced It > r 

for us to be here dedicated to the g 
ing before as, — that from these honored deal 
increased devotion to tk~; cause foe winch the; 
gave the last full measure c: we here 

highly resolve that these dead sh a2L_noi I 
vain, — that this nation, under God, shall have a 
birth : : :r e e 1 : m . — and th . 

v the peiple. for the people, shall r_:t perish from 
the earth. 



EXTRACT FROM GETTYSBURG ODE. 
the eyes that looked, the lif - 
Here, from the shadows of impending de. 

Those words of solemn breath, 

What voice may fitly break 
The silence, doubly hallowed, left ' 
We can but bow the head, with eyes grown dim, 

And. as a Nation's litany, repeat 
The phrase his martyrdom hath made complete, 
Noble as then, but now more sadly sweet : 



226 EXTRACT FROM THE LAST ANNUAL MESSAGE. 

"Let us, the Living, rather dedicate 
Ourselves to the unfinished work, which they 
Thus far advanced so nobly on its way, 

And save the periled State ! 
Let us, upon this field where they, the brave, 
Their last full measure of devotion gave, 
Highly resolve they have not died in vain ! — 
That, under God, the Nation's later birth 

Of Freedom, and the people's gain 
Of their own Sovereignty, shall never wane 
And perish from the circle of the earth!" 
From such a perfect text, shall Song aspire 

To light her faded fire, 

And into wandering music turn 
Its virtue, simple, sorrowful, and stern? 
His voice all elegies anticipated ; 

For, whatsoe'er the strain, 

We hear that one refrain : 
"We consecrate ourselves to them, the Consecrated!" 

Bayard Taylor. 



EXTRACT FROM THE LAST ANNUAL 
MESSAGE. 
The war continues. Since the last annual message 
all the important lines and positions then occupied 
by our forces have been maintained, and our armies 
have steadily advanced, thus liberating the regions 
left in the rear; so that Missouri, Kentucky, Ten- 



EXTRACT FROM THE LAST ANNUAL MESSAGE. 227 

nessee, and parts of other States have again produced 
reasonably fair crops. 

The most remarkable feature in the military 
operations of the year is General Sherman's attempted 
march of three hundred miles directly through 
insurgent regions. It tends to show a great increase 
of our relative strength, that our General-in-Chief 
should feel able to confront and hold in check every 
active force of the enemy and yet to detach a well- 
appointed, large army to move on such an expedition. 
The result not yet being known, conjecture in regard 
to it is not here indulged. 

Important movements have also occurred during 
the year to the effect of moulding society for dura- 
bility in the Union. Although short of complete 
success, it is much in the right direction that twelve 
thousand citizens in each of the States of Arkansas 
and Louisiana have organized loyal State govern- 
ments, with free Constitutions, and are earnestly 
struggling to maintain and administer them. 

The movements in the same direction, more exten- 
sive though less definite, in Missouri, Kentucky, and 
Tennessee, should not be overlooked. 

But Maryland presents the example of complete suc- 
cess. Maryland is secure to liberty and union for all 
the future. The genius of rebellion will no more claim 
Maryland. Like another foul spirit, being driven out, 
it may seek to tear her but it will rule her no more. 

At the last session of Congress a proposed amend- 



228 EXTRACT FROM THE LAST ANNUAL MESSAGE. 

ment of the Constitution, abolishing slavery through- 
out the United States, passed the Senate, but failed 
for lack of the requisite two-thirds vote in the House of 
Representatives. Although the present is the same 
Congress, and nearly the same members, and without 
questioning the patriotism of those who stood in opposi- 
tion, I venture to recommend the reconsideration and 
passage of the measure at the present session.* Of 
course the abstract question is not changed, but an in- 
tervening election shows, almost certainly, that the next 
Congress will pass the measure if this does not. Hence 
there is only a question of time as to when the proposed 
amendment will go to the States for their action, and 
as it is so to go at all events, may we not agree that 
the sooner the better? It is not claimed that the 
election has imposed a duty on members to change 
their views or their votes any further than, as an 
additional element to be considered, their judgment 
may be affected by it. It is the voice of the people 
now for the first time heard upon the question. In a 
great national crisis like ours, unanimity of action 
among those seeking a common end is very desirable, 
— almost indispensable; and yet no approach to such 
unanimity is attainable, unless some deference shall 
be paid to the will of the majority, simply because it 
is the will of the majority. In this case the common 
end is the maintenance of the Union, and among the 



♦Proposed by Congress Feb. i, 1865, and declared in force Dec. 
18, 1865. 



EXTRACT FROM THE LAST ANNUAL MESSAGE. 229 

means to secure that end, such will, through the 
election, is most clearly declared in favor of such 
Constitutional Amendment. 

The most reliable indication of public purpose in 
this country is derived through our popular election. 
Judging by the recent canvass and its result, the 
purpose of the people within the loyal States to main- 
tain the integrity of the Union, was never more firm 
nor more nearly unanimous than now. The extra- 
ordinary calmness and good order with which the 
millions of voters met and mingled at the polls give 
strong assurance of this. Not only those who sup- 
ported the "Union Ticket," so called, but a great 
majority of the opposing party also, may be fairly 
claimed to entertain, and to be actuated by, the same 
purpose. It is an unanswerable argument to this 
effect, that no candidate to any office whatever, high 
or low, has ventured to seek votes on the avowal that 
he was for giving up the Union. There has been 
much impugning of motives, and much heated con- 
troversy as to the proper means and best mode of 
advancing the Union cause ; but on the distinct issue 
of Union or no Union the politicians have shown their 
instinctive knowledge that there is no diversity among 
the people. In affording the people a fair oppor- 
tunity of showing one to another and to the world 
this firmness and unanimity of purpose, the election 
has been of vast value to the National cause. 

The election has exhibited another fact, not less 



230 EXTRACT FROM THE LAST ANNUAL MESSAGE. 

valuable to be known — the fact that we do not 
approach exhaustion in the most important branch of 
the national resources — that of living men. While 
it is melancholy to reflect that the war has filled so 
many graves, and carried mourning to so many 
hearts, it is some relief to know that compared with 
the surviving the fallen have been so few. While 
corps, and divisions, and brigades, and regiments 
have formed, and fought, and dwindled, and gone 
out of existence, a great majority of the men who 
composed them are still living. The same is true 
of the naval service. The election returns prove 
this. So many voters could not else be found. The 
States regularly holding elections, both now and four 
years ago, — to wit: California, Connecticut, Delaware, 
Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, 
Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New 
Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, 
Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Vir- 
ginia, and Wisconsin, — cast 3,982,011 votes now, 
against 3,870,222 then; to which are to be added 
33,762 cast now in the new States of Kansas and 
Nevada, which States did not vote in i860; thus 
swelling the aggregate to 4,015,773, and the net 
increase during the three years and a half of war, 
to HS^SS 1 - To this again should be added the num- 
ber of all soldiers in the field from Massachusetts, 
Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Indiana, Illi- 
nois, and California, who by the laws of those States 



EXTRACT FROM THE LAST ANNUAL MESSAGE. 23 1 

could not vote away from their homes, and which 
number cannot be less than ninety thousand. Nor 
yet is this all. The number in organized territories 
is triple now what it was four years ago, while 
thousands, white and black, join us as the National 
arms force back the insurgent lines. So much is 
shown, affirmatively and negatively, by the election. 

It is not material to inquire how the increase has 
been produced, or to show that it would have been 
greater but for the war, which is probably true; the 
important fact remaining demonstrated that we have 
more men now than we had when the war began; that 
we are not exhausted, nor in process of exhaustion; 
that we are gaining strength, and may, if need be, 
maintain the contest indefinitely. This as to men. 
Material resources are now more complete and 
abundant than ever. 

The National resources, then, are unexhausted, 
and, as we believe, inexhaustible. The public pur- 
pose to reestablish and maintain the National 
authority is unchanged, and, as we believe, unchange- 
able. The manner of continuing the effort remains 
to choose. On careful consideration of all the evi- 
dence accessible, it seems to me that no attempts at 
negotiation with the insurgent leader could result in 
any good. He would accept of nothing short of 
severance of the Union. His declarations to this effect 
are explicit and oft-repeated. He does not attempt to 
deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive our- 



232 EXTRACT FROM THE LAST ANNUAL MESSAGE. 

selves. He cannot voluntarily re-accept the Union; 
we cannot voluntarily yield it. 

Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, 
and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried 
by war, and decided by victory. If we yield, we are 
beaten ; if the Southern people fail him, he is beaten. 
Either way it would be the victory and defeat follow- 
ing war. What is true, however, of him who heads 
the insurgent cause, is not necessarily true of those 
who follow. Although he cannot re-accept the Union, 
they can. Some of them, we know, already desire 
peace and reunion. The number of such may increase. 
They can at any moment have peace simply by 
laying down their arms and submitting to the 
National authority under the Constitution. After so 
much, the Government could not, if it would, maintain 
war against them. The loyal people would not 
sustain or allow it. If questions should remain, we 
would adjust them by the peaceful means, of legisla- 
tion, conference, courts, and votes, operating only in 
constitutional and lawful channels. 

Some certain, and other possible, questions are, and 
would be, beyond the Executive power to adjust ; as, 
for instance, the admission of members into Congress, 
and whatever might require the appropriation of 
money. The Executive power itself would be really 
diminished by the cessation of actual war. Pardons 
and remissions of forfeitures, however, would still 
be within Executive control. In what spirit and 



EXTRACT FROM THE LAST ANNUAL MESSAGE. 233 

temper this control would be exercised can be 
fairly judged of by the past. A year ago general 
pardon and amnesty upon specified terms were 
offered to all except certain designated classes, 
and it was at this same time made known that 
the excepted classes were still within contempla- 
tion of special clemency. During the year many 
availed themselves of the general provision, and 
many more would, only that the sign of bad faith 
in some led to such precautionary measures as ren- 
dered the practical process less easy and certain. Dur- 
ing the same time, also, special pardons have been 
granted to individuals of the excepted classes, and 
no voluntary application has been denied. 

Thus, practically, the door has been for a full year 
open to all, except such as were not in condition to 
make free choice, — that is, such as were in custody or 
under constraint. It is still so open to all; but the 
time may come — probably will come — when public 
duty shall demand that it be closed ; and that in lieu 
more vigorous measures than heretofore shall be 
adopted. 

In presenting the abandonment of armed resistance 
to the National authority on the part of the insurgents 
as the only indispensable condition to ending the war 
on the part of the Government, I retract nothing 
heretofore said as to slavery. I repeat the declara- 
tion made a year ago, that "while I remain in my 
present position I shall not attempt to retract or 



234 LAUS DEO. 

modify the Emancipation Proclamation, nor shall I 
return to slavery any person who is free by the terms 
of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Con- 
gress. ' ' 

If the people should, by whatever mode or means, 
make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, 
another, and not I, must be their instrument to per- 
form it. 

In stating a single condition of peace, I mean 
simply to say, that the war will cease on the part of 
the Government whenever it shall have ceased on the 
part of those who began it. 

December 6, 1864. Abraham Lincoln. 



LAUS DEO! 



(On hearing the bells ring on the passage of the constitu- 
tional amendment abolishing slavery.) 

It is done ! 

Clang of bell and roar of gun 
Send the tidings up and down. 

How the belfries rock and reel! 

How the great guns, peal on peal, 
Fling the joy from town to town! 

Ring, O bells! 
Every stroke exulting tells 
Of the burial of crime. 



LAUS DEO. 

Loud and long, that all may hear, 
Ring for every listening ear 
Of Eternity and Time ! 

Let us kneel : 
God's own voice is in that peal, 

And this spot is holy ground. 
Lord, forgive us! What are we, 
That our eyes this glory see, 

That our ears have heard the sound ! 

For the Lord 
On the whirlwind is abroad; 

In the earthquake he has spoken ; 
He has smitten with his thunder 
The iron walls asunder, 

And the gates of brass are broken ! 

Loud and Long 
Lift the old exulting song; 

Sing with Miriam by the sea 
He has cast the mighty down ; 
Horse and rider sink and drown ; 

"He hath triumphed gloriously!" 

Did we dare, 

In our agony of prayer, 
Ask for more than he has done? 

When was ever his right hand 

Over any time or land 
Stretched as now beneath the sun? 



*3S 



J^6 LAUS DEO. 

How they pale, 
Ancient myth and song and tale, 

In this wonder of our days, 
When the cruel rod of war 
Blossoms white with righteous law, 

And the wrath of man is praise ! 

Blotted out! 

All within and all about 
Shall fresher life begin ; 

Freer breathe the universe 

As it rolls its heavy curse 
On the dead and buried sin! 

It is done ! 
In the circuit of the sun 

Shall the sound thereof go forth. 
It shall bid the sad rejoice, 
It shall give the dumb a voice, 

It shall belt with joy the earth ! 

Ring and swing, 
Bells of joy! On morning's wing 
Send the song of praise abroad ! 
With a sound of broken chains 
Tell the nations that He reigns, 
Who alone is Lord and God ! 

John Greenleaf Whittier. 



SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 237 



SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

{March 4, i86j.) 

Fellow-countrymen: — At this second appearing to 
take the oath of the Presidential office, there is less 
occasion for an extended address than there was at 
the first. Then, a statement, somewhat in detail, of 
a course to be pursued, seemed very fitting and 
proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during 
which public declarations have been constantly called 
forth on every point and phase of the great contest 
which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the 
energies of the nation, little that is new could be 
presented. 

The progress of our arms, upon which all else 
chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to 
myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and 
encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, 
no prediction in regard to it is ventured. On the 
occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all 
thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil 
war. All dreaded it; all sought to avoid it. While 
the inaugural address was being delivered from this 
place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without 
war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to 
destroy it without war, — seeking to dissolve the 
Union and divide effects by negotiation. 

Both parties deprecated war; but one of them 



238 SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

would make war rather than let the nation survive, 
and the other would accept war rather than let it 
perish — and the war came. 

One-eighth of the whole population were colored 
slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but 
located in the southern part of it. These slaves 
constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All 
knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of 
the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this 
interest was the object for which the insurgents would 
rend the Union, even by war ; while the Government 
claimed no right to do more than to restrict the terri- 
torial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for 
the war the magnitude or the duration which it has 
already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause 
of the conflict might cease even before the conflict 
itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, 
and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both 
read the same Bible and pray to the same God ; and 
each invokes His aid against the other. It may 
seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just 
God's assistance in wringing his bread from the sweat 
of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we 
be not judged. 

The prayers of both could not be answered. That 
of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty 
has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because 
of offenses ! for it must needs be that offenses come ; 
but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. ' ' 



SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 239 

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those 
offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs 
come, but which, having continued through His 
appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He 
gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the 
woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we 
discern therein any departure from those Divine 
attributes which the believers in a living God always 
ascribe to Him? 

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this 
mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, 
if God wills that it continue until all the wealth 
piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years 
of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop 
of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another 
drawn with the sword; as was said three thousand 
years ago, so still it must be said — "that the judgments 
of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. ' ' 

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with 
firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, 
let us strive on to finish the work we are in ; to bind 
up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall 
have borne the battle, and for his widow and his 
orphans ; to do all which may achieve and cherish a 
just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all 
nations. 



240 THE SECOND INAUGURAL. 

THE SECOND INAUGURAL. 

The "Second Inaugural" — a written composition, 
though read to the citizens from the steps of the 
Capitol — well illustrates our words. Mr. Lincoln had 
to tell his countrymen that, after a four years' 
struggle, the war was practically ended. The four 
years' agony, the passion of love which he felt for 
his country, his joy in her salvation, his sense of 
tenderness for those who fell, of pity mixed with 
sternness for the men who had deluged the land with 
blood, — all the thoughts these feelings inspired were 
behind Lincoln, pressing for expression. A writer of 
less power would have been overwhelmed. Lincoln 
remained master of the emotional and intellectual 
situation. In three or four hundred words that burn 
with the heat of their compression, he tells the history 
of the war and reads its lesson. No nobler thoughts 
were ever conceived. No man ever found words 
more adequate to his desire. Here is the whole tale 
of the nation's shame and misery, of her heroic 
struggle to free herself therefrom, and of her victory. 
Had Lincoln written a hundred times as much more, 
he could not have said more fully what he desired 
to say. Every thought receives its complete expres- 
sion, and there is no word employed which does 
not directly and manifestly contribute to the develop- 
ment of the central thought. 

— London Spectator, April 25 and May 2, 1891. 



LAST PUBLIC ADDRESS. 24I 

LAST PUBLIC ADDRESS. 

{Delivered April 11, 1865, in Washington, from the White 
House, in response to a call from the people gathered. ) 

Fellow-Citizens: — We meet this evening not in 
sorrow, but in gladness of heart. The evacuation of 
Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the 
principal insurgent army, give hope of a righteous and 
speedy peace, whose joyous expression cannot be 
restrained. In the midst of this, however, He from 
whom all blessings flow must not be forgotten. A 
call for a National Thanksgiving is being prepared, 
and will be duly promulgated. Nor must those 
wmose harder part gives us the cause of rejoicing be 
overlooked. Their honors must not be parceled 
out with others. I myself was near the front, and 
had the high pleasure of transmitting much of the 
good news to you; but no part of the honor or plan or 
execution is mine. To General Grant, his skillful 
officers, and brave men, all belongs. The gallant 
Navy stood ready, but was not in reach to take an 
active part. 

By these recent successes the reinauguration of the 
national authority — reconstruction — which has had a 
large share of thought from the first, is pressed 
much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught 
with great difficulty. Unlike the case of a war between 
independent nations, there is no authorized organ 
for us to treat with. No one man has authority to 



242 LAST PUBLIC ADDRESS. 

give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply 
must begin with and mould from disorganized and 
discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional 
embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ 
amongst ourselves as to the mode, manner, and 
measure of reconstruction. As a general rule, I ab- 
stain from reading the reports of attacks upon myself, 
wishing not to be provoked by that to which I can- 
not properly offer an answer. But in spite of this 
precaution, it comes to my knowledge that I am much 
censured from some supposed agency in setting up and 
seeking to sustain the new State Government of 
Louisiana. 

In this I have done just so much as, and no more 
than, the public knows. In the annual Message of 
December, 1863, and in the accompanying Proclama- 
tion, I presented a plan of reconstruction, as the 
phrase goes, which I promised, if adopted by any 
State, should be acceptable to and sustained by the 
Executive Government of the nation. I distinctly 
stated that this was not the only plan which might 
possibly be acceptable, and I also distinctly protested 
that the Executive claimed no right to say when or 
whether members should be admitted to seats in 
Congress from such States. This plan was in ad- 
vance submitted to the then Cabinet, and was distinctly 
approved by every member of it. One of them 
suggested that I should then and in that connection 
apply the Emancipation Proclamation to the there- 



LAST PUBLIC ADDRESS. 243 

tofore excepted parts of Virginia and Louisiana, 
that I should drop the suggestion about apprentice- 
ship for freed people, and that I should omit the 
protest against my own power in regard to the 
admission of members of Congress; but even he 
approved ever}'- part and parcel of the plan which has 
since been employed or touched by the action of 
Louisiana. 

The new Constitution of Louisiana, declaring eman- 
cipation for the whole State, practically applies the 
proclamation to the part previously excepted. It 
does not adopt apprenticeship for freed people, 
and it is silent — as it could not well be otherwise — 
about the admission of members to Congress. So 
that, as it applies to Louisiana, every member of 
the Cabinet fully approved the plan. The message 
went to Congress, and I received many commenda- 
tions of the plan, written and verbal, and not a single 
objection to it from any professed emancipationist 
came to my knowledge until after the news reached 
Washington that the people of Louisiana had begun 
to move in accordance with it. From about July, 
1862, I had corresponded with different persons sup- 
posed to be interested in seeking a reconstruction of 
a State Government for Louisiana. When the mes- 
sage of 1863, with the plan before mentioned, reached 
New Orleans, General Banks wrote me that he was 
confident the people, with his military cooperation, 
would reconstruct substantially on that plan. I wrote 



^44 LAST PUBLIC ADDRESS. 

to him and some of them to try it. They tried it, 
and the result is known. Such only has been my 
agency in getting up the Louisiana Government. 
As to sustaining it, my promise is out, as before 
But, as bad promises are better broken than 
kept, I shall treat this as a bad promise, and break 
it whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it 
is adverse to the public interest; but I have not 
yet been so convinced. I have been shown a letter 
on this subject, supposed to be an able one, in which 
the writer expresses regret that my mind has not 
seemed to be definitely fixed on the question whether 
the seceded States, so called, are in the Union or 
out of it. It would perhaps add astonishment to 
his regret were he to learn that since I have found 
professed Union men endeavoring to make that 
question, I have purposely forborne any public 
expression upon it; as it appears to me that ques- 
tion has not been, nor yet is, a practically material 
one, and any discussion of it, while it thus remains 
practically immaterial, could have no effect other than 
the mischievous one of dividing our friends. As yet, 
whatever it may hereafter become, that question is 
bad as the basis of a controversy, and good for nothing 
at all — a merely pernicious abstraction. 

We all agree that the seceded States, so called, 
are out of their proper practical relation with the 
Union, and that the sole object of the Government, 
civil and military, in regard to those States is to 



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246 LAST PUBLIC ADDRESS. 

thousand voters in the heretofore slave State of 
Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, 
assumed to be the rightful political power of the 
State, held elections, organized a State government, 
adopted a free State constitution, giving the benefit 
of public schools equally to black and white, and 
empowering the Legislature to confer the elective 
franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature 
has already voted to ratify the Constitutional amend- 
ment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery 
throughout the Nation. These twelve thousand 
persons are thus fully committed to the Union and 
to perpetual freedom in the State — committed to the 
vety things, and nearly all the things, the Nation 
wants — and they ask the Nation's recognition and its 
assistance to make good their committal. 

Now, if we reject and spurn them, we do our 
utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We, in 
effect, say to the white man, "You are worthless or 
worse; we will neither help you, nor be helped by 
you." To the blacks we say, "This cup of liberty 
which your old masters hold to your lips we will 
dash from you, and leave you to the chances of 
gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some 
vague and undefined when, where, and how. " If this 
course, by discouraging and paralyzing both white 
and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into 
proper practical relation with the Union, I have so 
far been unable to perceive it. If, on the contrary, 



LAST PUBLIC ADDRESS. 247 

we recognize and sustain the new Government of 
Louisiana, the converse of all this is made true. We 
encourage the hearts and nerve the arms of the 
twelve thousand to adhere to their work, and argue 
for it, and proselyte for it, and fight for it, and feed 
it, and grow it, and ripen it to a complete success. 
The colored man, too, in seeing all united for him, 
is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, 
to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective 
franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the 
already advanced steps toward it than by running 
backward over them? Concede that the new Gov- 
ernment of Louisiana is only to what it should be 
as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the 
fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it. 

Again, if we reject Louisiana we also reject one 
vote in favor of the proposed amendment to the 
National Constitution. To meet this proposition it 
has been argued that no more than three-fourths 
of those States which have not attempted secession 
are necessary to validly ratify the amendment. I 
do not commit myself against this further than to 
say that such a ratification would be questionable, 
and sure to be persistently questioned, while a rati- 
fication by three-fourths of all the States would be 
unquestioned and unquestionable. I repeat the 
question: Can Louisiana be brought into proper 
practical relation with the Union sooner by sustain- 
ing or by discarding her new State Government? 



248 MY CAPTAIN. 

What has been said of Louisiana will apply gener- 
ally to other States; yet so great peculiarities per- 
tain to each State, and such important and sudden 
changes occur in the same State, and withal so new 
and unprecedented is the whole case that no exclusive 
and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to 
details and collaterals. An exclusive and inflexible 
plan would surely become a new entanglement. 
Important principles may and must be inflexible. 
In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be 
my duty to make some new announcement to the 
people of the South. I am considering, and shall 
not fail to act when satisfied that action will be 
proper. 



MY CAPTAIN. 



(On the Death of Lincoln. ) 
O Captain ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done ; 
The ship has weathered every rock, the prize we 

sought is won ; 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all 

exulting, 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim 
and daring: 
But, O heart! heart! heart! 
Leave you not the little spot, 
Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 



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MY CAPTAIN. 249 

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the 

bells ; 
Rise up, — for you the flag is flung, — for you the bugle 

trills ; 
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths, — for you the 

shores a-crowding; 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces 
turning; 
O Captain! dear father; 
This arm I push beneath you; 
It is some dream that on the deck 
You've fallen cold and dead. 

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and 

still ; 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor 

will ; 
But the ship, the ship, is anchored safe, its voyage 

closed and done ; 
From fearful trip, the victor-ship comes in with 
object won. 
Exult, O shore, and ring, O bells! 
But I, with silent tread, 
Walk the spot my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 

Walt Whitman. 



250 EXTRACT FROM COMMEMORATION ODE. 



EXTRACT FROM COMMEMORATION ODE. 

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief, 

"Whom late the nation he had led, 

With ashes on her head, 
Wept with the passion of an angry grief : 
Forgive me, if from present things I turn 
To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, 
And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. 
Nature, they say, doth dote, 
And cannot make a man 
Save on some worn-out plan, 
Repeating us by rote : 
For him her Old- World moulds aside she threw, 

And, choosing sweet clay from the breast 

Of the unexhausted "West, 
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, 
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. 

How beautiful to see 
Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, 
Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead ; 
One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, 

Not lured by any cheat of birth, 

But by his clear-grained human worth, 
And brave old wisdom of sincerity ! 

They knew that outward grace is dust ; 

They could not choose but trust 
In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill, 

And supple-tempered will 
That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. 

His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind, 

Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars, 



ext:- :de. 

- 
Broad prai - - - 
Fruitful and friendly for all human k: - 
Yet also nigh to heaven and loved c 
! 

■ 
Bse any nan: a - ^nd Peer 
Could Nature's e<: ne deface 

Herr 
A~ i one of P lutatc h s m ■ face. 

I praise him not ; it were 
And some innaiive weak] •: be 

In he: 
Sncii as the Pres tg not wait. 

Safe in himself as in a - 
~"*>w - he: 



--to bide I 

Ti" ie. 

Gre.. . 

Disturb our judgme:" 
Bn: 
These all are gone, and, standing like a tower. 
Our children shall behold 

The kmdb --.an, 

t blame, 
Newt - 

Ja>ies Russell Lowell. 



SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 



253 



SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 

( The fol hiving stories about Mr. Lincoln are all taken from a 
little book, "Six Months at the White House with Abraham 
Lincoln," by F. B. Carpenter, published by Hurd &> Hough- 
ton in 1866. The booh is an excellent one for whoever de- 
sires to get a good view of Mr. Lincoln's home life and 
wishes to look at him through the eyes of the artist who 
writes it. — Ed.) 

Judge Baldwin of California, being in Washington, 
called one day on General Halleck, and presuming 
upon a familiar acquaintance in California a few years 
before, solicited a pass outside of our lines to see a 
brother in Virginia, not thinking that he would meet 
with a refusal, as both his brother and himself were 
good Union men. "We have been deceived too 
often," said General Halleck, "and I regret I can't 
grant it." Judge B. then went to Stanton, and was 
briefly disposed of, with the same result. Finally, he 
obtained an interview with Mr. Lincoln, and stated 
his case. "Have you applied to General Halleck?" 
inquired the President. "Yes, and met with a flat 
refusal," said Judge B. "Then you must see Stan- 
ton," continued the President. "I have, and with the 
same result," was the reply. "Well, then," said Mr. 
Lincoln, with a smile, "I can do nothing; for you 
must know that I have very little influence with this 
Administration. " 

255 



256 SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 

A lieutenant, whom debts compelled to leave his 
fatherland and service, succeeded in being admitted 
to President Lincoln, and by reason of his commend- 
able and winning deportment and intelligent appear- 
ance, was promised a lieutenant's commission in a 
cavalry regiment. He was so enraptured with his 
success, that he deemed it a duty to inform the Presi- 
dent that he belonged to one of the oldest noble 
houses in Germany. "Oh, never mind that," said 
Mr. Lincoln; "you will not find that to be an obstacle 
to your advancement. ' ' 

* 

* * 

A juvenile "brigadier" from New York, with a 
small detachment of cavalry, having imprudently 
gone within the rebel lines near Fairfax Court House, 
was captured by "guerrillas. " Upon the fact's being 
reported to Mr. Lincoln, he said that he was very 
sorry to lose the horses! "What do you mean?" 
inquired his informant. "Why," rejoined the Presi- 
dent, "I can make a better 'brigadier' any day; but 
those horses cost the government a hundred and 
twenty-five dollars a head!" 

* 

* * 

A gentleman was pressing very strenuously the 
promotion of an officer to a "brigadiership. " "But 
we have already more generals than we know what to 
do with," replied the President. "But," persisted 
the visitor, "my friend is very strongly recom- 



SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 257 

mended." "Now, look here," said Mr. Lincoln, 
throwing one leg over the arm of his chair, "you are 
a farmer, I believe ; if not, you will still understand me. 
Suppose you had a large cattle yard full of all sorts of 
cattle, — cows, oxen, bulls, — and you kept killing and 
selling and disposing of your cows and oxen, in one 
way and another, — taking good care of your bulls. 
By and by you would find that you had nothing but a 
yard full of old bulls, good for nothing under heaven. 
Now, it will be just so with the army, if I don't stop 
making brigadier-generals." 

* 
* * 

The celebrated case of Franklin W. Smith and 
brother was one of those which most largely helped 
to bring military tribunals into public contempt. 
These two gentlemen were arrested and kept in con- 
finement, their papers seized, their business de- 
stroyed, their reputation damaged, and a naval court- 
martial, "organized to convict," pursued them 
unrelentingly till a wiser and juster hand arrested the 
malice of their persecutors. It is known that Presi- 
dent Lincoln, after full investigation of the case, 
annulled the whole proceedings, but it is remarkable 
that the actual record of his decision could never be 
obtained from the Navy Department. An exact copy 
being withheld, the following was presented to the 
Boston Board of Trade as being very nearly the words 
of the President: 



258 SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 

" Whereas, Franklin W. Smith had transactions with the Navy 
Department to the amount of one million and a quarter of 
a million of dollars; and whereas, he had the chance to steal a 
quarter of a million, and was only charged with stealing twenty- 
two hundred dollars — and the question now is about his stealing 
a hundred — I don't believe he stole anything at all. Therefore, 
the record and findings are disapproved — declared null and void, 
and the defendants are fully discharged." 

* 
* * 

As the day of his re-inauguration approached, Mr. 
Lincoln said to Senator Clark of New Hampshire, 
"Can't you and others start a public sentiment in 
favor of making no changes in offices except for 
good and sufficient cause? It seems as though the 
bare thought of going through again what I did 
the first year here would crush me." To another 
he said: "I have made up my mind to make very 
few changes in the offices in my gift for my second 
term. I think now that I will not remove a single 
man, except for delinquency. To remove a man is 
very easy, but when I go to fill his place, there 
are twenty applicants, and of these I must make 
nineteen enemies." "Under these circumstances," 
says one of his friends, "Mr. Lincoln's natural charity 
for all was often turned into an unwonted suspicion of 
the motives of men whose selfishness cost him so 
much wear of mind. Once he said, 'Sitting here, 
where all the avenues to public patronage seem to 
come together in a knot, it does seem to me that our 
people are fast approaching the point where it can be 



SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 259 

said that seven-eighths of them are trying - to find how 
to live at the expense of the other eighth'." 

* 

* * 

No nobler reply ever fell from the lips of ruler than 
that uttered by President Lincoln in response to the 
clergyman who ventured to say, in his presence, that 
he hoped "the Lord was on our side." "lam not at 
all concerned about that," replied Mr. Lincoln, "for I 
know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. 
But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that / and 
this nation should be on the Lord's side." 

* 

* * 

There was not unfrequently a curious mingling of 
humor and pathos exhibited in Mr. Lincoln's exercise 
of the pardoning power. Lieutenant-Governor Ford, 
of Ohio, had an appointment with him one evening at 
six o'clock. As he entered the vestibule of the White 
House his attention was attracted by a poorly clad 
young woman who was violently sobbing. He asked 
her the cause of her distress. She said that she had 
been ordered away by the servants, after vainly wait- 
ing many hours to see the President about her only 
brother, who had been condemned to death. Her 
story was this : She and her brother were foreigners, 
and orphans. They had been in this country several 
years. Her brother enlisted in the army, but, through 
bad influences, was induced to desert. He was cap- 



260 SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 

tured, tried, and sentenced to be shot — the old story. 
The poor girl had obtained the signatures of some 
persons who had formerly known him to a petition for 
a pardon, and, alone, had come to Washington to lay 
the case before the President. Thronged as the 
waiting rooms always were, she had passed the long 
hcmrs of two days trying in vain to get an audience, 
and had at length been ordered away. 

Mr. Ford's sympathies were at once enlisted. He 
said that he had come to see the President, but did 
not know that he should succeed. He told her, how- 
ever, to follow him up-stairs and he would see what 
could be done. Just before reaching the door, Mr. 
Lincoln came out, and meeting his friend, said good- 
humoredly, "Are you not ahead of time?" Mr. Ford 
showed his watch, with the pointers upon the hour of 
six. "Well," replied he, "I have been so busy to-day 
that I have not had time to get a lunch. Go in and 
sit down ; I will be back directly. ' ' 

Mr. Ford made the young woman accompany him 
into the office, and when they were seated, said to her: 
"Now, my good girl, I want you to muster all the 
courage you have in the world. When the President 
comes back he will sit down in that arm chair. I 
shall get up to speak to him, and as I do so you must 
force yourself between us, and insist upon his exam- 
ination of your papers, telling him it is a case of life 
and death, and admits of no delay." These instruc- 
tions were carried out to the letter. Mr. Lincoln was 



SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 26 1 

at first somewhat surprised at the apparent forward- 
ness of the young woman, but observing her distressed 
appearance, he ceased conversation with his friend, 
and commenced an examination of the document she 
had placed in his hands. Glancing from it to the face 
of the petitioner, whose tears had broken forth afresh, 
he studied its expression for a moment, and then his 
eyes fell upon her scanty but neat dress. Instantly 
his face lighted up. "My poor girl," said he, "you 
have come here with no governor, or senator, or mem- 
ber of congress, to plead your cause. You seem 
honest and truthful; and" — with much emphasis- 
"you don't wear hoops; and I'll be whipped, but I will 
pardon your brother. ' ' 

Among a large number of persons waiting in the 
room to speak with Mr. Lincoln on a certain day in 
November, 1864, was a small, pale, delicate-looking 
boy about thirteen years old. The President saw him 
standing, looking feeble and faint, and said: "Come 
here, my boy, and tell me what you want." The boy 
advanced, placed his hand on the arm of the Presi- 
dent's chair, and with bowed head and timid accents 
said: "Mr. President, I have been a drummer in a 
regiment for two years, and my colonel got angry 
with me and turned me off. I was taken sick, and 
have been a long time in hospital. This is the first 
time I have been out, and I came to see if you could 
not do something for me." The President looked at 



262 SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 

him kindly and tenderly, and asked him where he 
lived. "I have no home," answered the boy. 
"Where is your father?" "He died in the army," was 
the reply. "Where is your mother?" "My mother is 
dead also. I have no mother, no father, no brothers, 
no sisters, and," bursting into tears, "no friends — 
nobody cares for me." Mr. Lincoln's eyes filled 
with tears, and he said to him: "Can't you sell news- 
papers?" "No," said the boy, "I am too weak; and 
the surgeon of the hospital told me I must leave, and 
I have no money and no place to go to." The scene 
was wonderfully affecting. The President drew forth 
a card, and addressing on it certain officials to whom 
his request was law, gave special directions "to care 
for this poor boy." The wan face of the little 
drummer lit up with a happy smile as he received the 
paper, and he went away convinced that he had one 
good and true friend, at least, in the person of the 

President. ^ 

* * 

In the Executive Chamber one evening, there were 
present a number of gentlemen, among them Mr. 
Seward. 

A point in the conversation suggesting the thought, 
the President said: "Seward, you never heard, did 
you, how I earned my first dollar?" "No," rejoined 
Mr. Seward. "Well," continued Mr. Lincoln, "I was 
about eighteen years of age. I belonged, you know, 
to what they call down South, the 'scrubs'; people 



SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 263 

who do not own slaves are nobody there. But we 
had succeeded in raising, chiefly by ray labor, suffi- 
cient produce, as I thought, to justify me in taking it 
down the river to sell. 

"After much persuasion, I got the consent of 
mother to go, and constructed a little flat-boat, large 
enough to take a barrel or two of things that we had 
gathered, with myself and little bundle, down to New 
Orleans. A steamer was coming down the river. We 
have, you know, no wharves on the western streams; 
and the custom was, if passengers were at any of the 
landings, for them to go out in a boat, the steamer 
stopping and taking them on board. 

"I was contemplating my new flat-boat, and won- 
dering whether I could make it stronger or improve it 
in any particular, when two men came down to the 
shore in carriages with trunks, and looking at the 
different boats singled out mine, and asked, 'Who 
owns this?' I answered, somewhat modestly, 'I do.' 
'Will you,' said one of them, 'take us and our trunks 
out to the steamer?' 'Certainly,' said I. I was very 
glad to have the chance of earning something. I sup- 
posed that each of them would give me two or three 
bits. The trunks were put on my flat-boat, the pas- 
sengers seated themselves on the trunks, and I sculled 
them out to the steamboat. 

"They got on board, and I lifted up their heavy 
trunks, and put them on deck. The steamer was 
about to put on steam again, when I called out that 



264 SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 

they had forgotten to pay me. Each of them took 
from his pocket a silver half-dollar, and threw it on 
the floor of my boat. I could scarcely believe my 
eyes as I picked up the money. Gentlemen, you may 
think it was a very little thing, and in these days it 
seems to me a trifle; but it was a most important 
incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a 
poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day, — that 
by honest work I had earned a dollar. The world 
seemed wider and fairer before me. I was a more 
hopeful and confident being from that time." 

* * 

At one of the "levees," in the winter of 1864, dur- 
ing a lull in the hand-shaking, Mr. Lincoln was 
addressed by two lady friends, one of whom is the 
wife of a gentleman subsequently called into the cabi- 
net. Turning to them with a weary air, he remarked 
that it was a relief to have now and then those to talk 
to who had no favors to ask. The lady referred to is 
a radical, — a New Yorker by birth, but for many years 
a resident of the west. She replied, playfully, "Mr. 
President, I have one request to make." "Ah!" said 
he, at once looking grave. "Well, what is it?" 

"That you suppress the infamous Times" was the 

rejoinder. After a brief pause, Mr. Lincoln asked 
her if she had ever tried to imagine how she would 
have felt, in some former administration to which she 
was opposed, if her favorite newspaper had been 



SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 265 

seized by the government and suppressed. The lady- 
replied that it was not a parallel case; that in circum- 
stances like those then existing, when the nation was 
struggling for its very life, such utterances as were 
daily put forth in that journal should be suppressed 
by the strong hand of authority; that the cause of 
loyalty and good government demanded it. "I fear 
you do not fully comprehend, " returned the President, 
"the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. 
Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever 
justify it. A government had better go to the very 
extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be 
construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize 
in any degree, the common rights of its citizens." 

* 
* # 

On Thursday of a certain week two ladies, from 
Tennessee, came before the President, asking the 
release of their husbands, held as prisoners of war at 
Johnson's Island. They were put off until Friday, 
when they came again, and were again put off until 
Saturday. At each of the interviews one of the ladies 
urged that her husband was a religious man. On 
Saturday, when the President ordered the release of 
the prisoner, he said to this lady, — "You say your hus- 
band is a religious man; tell him, when you meet 
him, that I say I am not much of a judge of religion, 
but that in my opinion the religion which sets men to 
rebel and fight against their government because, as 



266 SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 

they think, that government does not sufficiently help 
some men to eat their bread in the sweat of other 
men's faces, is not the sort of religion upon which 
people can get to heaven. ' ' 

* 
* * 

The famous "peace" conference, on board the River 
Queen, in Hampton Roads, between President Lincoln 
and Secretary Seward, and the rebel commissioners, 
Stephens, Hunter, and Campbell, took place the 3d of 
February, 1865. 

Mr. Davis had on this occasion, as on that of Mr. 
Stephens' visit to Washington, made it a condition 
that no conference should be had unless his rank as 
commander or president should first be recognized. Mr. 
Lincoln declared that the only ground on which he could 
rest the justice of the war — either with his own people 
or with foreign powers — was that it was not a war for 
conquest, for that the States had never been separated 
from the Union. Consequently, he could not recog- 
inize another government inside of the one of which 
he alone was President, nor admit the separate inde- 
pendence of States that were yet a part of the 
Union. "That," said he, "would be doing what you 
have so long asked Europe to do in vain, and be 
resigning the only thing the armies of the Union are 
fighting for." 

Mr. Hunter made a long reply to this, insisting that 
the recognition of Davis' power to make a treaty was 



SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 267 

the first and indispensable step to peace, and referred 
to the correspondence between King Charles I. and his 
Parliament, as a trustworthy precedent of a constitu- 
tional ruler treating with rebels. 

Mr. Lincoln's face then wore that indescribable 
expression which generally preceded his hardest hits, 
and he remarked: "Upon questions of history I must 
refer you to Mr. Seward, for he is posted in such things, 
and I don't pretend to be bright. My only distinct 
recollection of the matter is, that Charles lost his head. ' ' 

* 

* * 

Mr. Lincoln's wit was never malicious nor rudely 
personal. Once when Mr. Douglas had attempted to 
parry an argument by impeaching the veracity of a 
senator whom Mr. Lincoln had quoted, he answered* 
that the question was not one of veracity, but simply 
one of argument. "By a course of reasoning, Euclid 
proves that all the angles in a triangle are equal to two 
right angles. Now, if you undertake to disprove that 
proposition, would you prove it to be false by calling 
Euclid a liar?" 

* * 

The following is related by a newspaper corre- 
spondent of "a couple of aged, plain country people, 
poorly clad, but with frank open countenances," who 
had called to see the President: 

"Now is your time, dear," said the husband, as the 

*Speech at Charleston, September 18, 1858. 



268 SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 

President dismissed the one preceding them. The 
lady stepped forward, made a low courtesy, and said : 

"Mr. President." 

Mr. Lincoln, looking over his spectacles, fixed those 
gray, piercing, yet mild, eyes upon her, then lifting 
his head and extending his hand, he said, in the kind- 
est tones: 

"Well, good lady, what can I do for you?" 

"Mr. President," she resumed, "I feel so embar- 
rassed I can hardly speak. I never spoke to a Presi- 
dent before ; but I am a good Union woman down in 
Maryland, and my son is wounded badly, and in the 
hospital, and I have been trying to get him out, but 
somehow couldn't, and they said I had better come right 
to you. When the war first broke out I gave my son 
first to God, and then told him he might go fight the 
rebels; and now if you will let me take him home I will 
nurse him up, and just as soon as he gets well enough 
he shall go right back and help put down the rebellion. 
He is a good boy, and don't want to shirk the service." 

I was looking full in Mr. Lincoln's face. I saw the 
tears gathering in his eyes, and his lips quivered as he 
replied: 

"Yes, yes, God bless you! you shall have your son. 
What hospital did you say?" It seemed a relief to 
him to turn aside and write a few words, which he 
handed to the woman, saying: "There, give that to 

; and you will get your son, if he is able to go 

home with you. " 



SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 269 

In the July following Mr. Lincoln's inauguration, an 
extra session of Congress was called. In the message 
then sent in, speaking of secession, and the measures 
taken by the Southern leaders to bring it about, there 
occurs the following sentence: "With rebellion thus 
sugar-coated, they have been drugging the public 
mind of their section for more than thirty years ; until, 
at length, they have brought many good men to a will- 
ingness to take up arms against the government, ' ' etc. 
Mr. Defrees, the government printer, told me that, 
when the message was being printed, he was a good 
deal disturbed by the use of the term "sugar-coated," 
and finally went to the President about it. Their 
relations to each other being of the most intimate 
character, he told Mr. Lincoln frankly that he ought 
to remember that a message to Congress was a differ- 
ent affair from a speech at a mass-meeting in Illinois; 
that the messages became a part of history, and should 
be written accordingly. 

"What is the matter now?" inquired the President. 

"Why," said Mr. Defrees, "you have used an undig- 
nified expression in the message;" and then, reading 
the paragraph aloud, he added, "I would alter the 
structure of that, if I were you." 

"Defrees," replied Mr. Lincoln, "that word 
expresses precisely my idea, and I am not going to 
change it. The time will never come in this country 
when the people won't know exactly what 'sugar- 
coated' means!" 



270 SOME STORIES ABOUT LINCOLN. 

"Upon entering the President's office one after- 
noon," says a Washington correspondent, "I found 
Mr. Lincoln busily counting greenbacks. 'This, sir,' 
said he, 'is something out of my usual line; but a 
President of the United States has a multiplicity of 
duties not specified in the Constitution or acts of 
Congress. This is one of them. This money belongs 
to a poor negro who is a porter in the Treasury 
Department, at present very bad with the small-pox. 
He is now in hospital, and could not draw his pay 
because he could not sign his name. I have been at 
considerable trouble to overcome the difficulty and get 
it for him, and have at length succeeded in cutting 
red tape, as you newspaper men say. I am now 
dividing the money and putting by a portion labeled, 
in an envelope, with my own hands, according to his 
wish;' and he proceeded to endorse the package very 
carefully." No one witnessing the transaction could 
fail to appreciate the goodness of heart which 
prompted the President of the United States to turn 
aside for a time from his weighty cares to succor one 
of the humblest of his fellow-creatures in sickness and 
sorrow, 



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